^i 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



^ Cfjrtstian's! Ilatiits 



ROBERT E. SPEER 



^ 



PHILADELPHIA 

1911 



Copyright, 191 i, by 



^K^^ 



The Trustees of the Presbyterian Board of 
Publication and Sabbath-School Work 



Published April, 1 91 1 



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©Cl. A 2861 (•>;'> 



PHILADELPHIA, WITHERSPOON BUILDING 

New York . Chicago San Francisco 

St. Louis Nashville 




i 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface 7 

The Place of Habit 9 

The Habit of Prayer 15 

The Habit of Duty. I 23 

The Habit of Duty. II 29 

The Habit of Duty. HI 35 

The Habit of Good Thinking 42 

The Habit of Wise Spending 50 

The Habit of Hopefulness 61 

The Habit of Doing Things Now 70 

The Habit of High-Mindedness 77 

The Habit of High-Minded Lowliness 85 

The Habit of Not Dawdling 92 

The Habit of Decision 98 

The Habit of Finding the Will of God 107 






A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



PREFACE 

"A ND he entered as his custom was, 
/^ into the synagogue on the sabbath 
day/' 

*'And as he was wont, he taught them/' 

'^And went, as his custom was, unto the 
mount of OHves/' 

''The Father . . . hath not left me alone; 
for I do always the things that are pleasing 
to him/' 

These were some of the habits of the 
Lord. He had habits, as each man must 
have, as God himself has; for do we not 
read of ''the ways of the Lx)rd" ? Is this 
not ever the earnest man's prayer, "Show 
me thy ways, O Lord, teach me thy paths" ? 
Indeed, it was to be the blessing of the lat- 
ter days that they would fulfill this prayer. 
"And many nations shall go and say, Come 
ye, and let us go up to the mountain of Jeho- 
vah, and to the house of the God of Jacob; 
and he will teach us of his ways, and we will 
walk in his paths." 

This little book is an effort to discover 
and describe some of these paths of God 
which are to be the habits of his children. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



THE PLACE OF HABIT 

LIFE is a school of habit. There is a 
real sense in which our business here 
is simply the acquisition of habits. 
We start with certain inherited tendencies 
and capabilities and these certainly do affect 
our choices, and the choices grow into our 
habits; but whatever the bias for good or 
evil with which we start, we are not bound 
by it. How often we see a good ancestry 
shamed in some bad son, and a bad ancestry 
exalted by some good son ! Whatever the 
bias with which we are born, and the pres- 
sure of our surroundings upon us, and how- 
ever much excuse is to be found in these for 
the wreck of some lives, it is still true that 
we order our own ways and that we order 
them by the character of the habits we 
choose to acquire. 

We begin our work in this school when 
we begin to live. At once upon beginning 
to live we begin to act, and each act makes 
its repetition easier, so that we are more 
likely to duplicate that act than to perform 
a new one. No one needs to teach us to 
form habits. We do it by reason of our 



10 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



nature, of which, as Carlyle said : *'Habit 
is the deepest law. It is our supreme 
strength, if also in certain circumstances, our 
most miserable weakness. Let me go once 
scanning my way with any earnestness of 
outlook, and successfully arriving, my foot- 
steps are an invitation to me a second time 
to go by the same way. It is easier than 
any other way. Habit is our perennial law 
—habit and imitation — there is nothing more 
perennial in us than these two. They are 
the source of all working and all apprentice- 
ship, of all practice and all learning in the 
world." 

The law of habit is not a dead mechani- 
cal law. It is simply the government of 
God applying to all life, giving stability and 
order and firm principle to it. It is the as- 
surance that we can keep the results of our 
efforts and experience, that there is an end 
toward which we can move and that we are 
not to be left alone to be molded by nothing, 
or to be molded by events and circumstances 
which are more powerful than we. *^The 
truth is,'' as Edward Bowen, one of the great 
English schoolmasters wrote in an essay on 
'The Force of Habit," 'Ue truth is not 
that events mold us, but that we mold our- 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 11 



selves : that is, if with reverence it may be 
spoken, the Creator supphes the instruments, 
and we have the work to do. Whether our 
work be a cheerless, solitary task, a forlorn 
and unaided toil, or whether in no single 
action are we destitute of a guidance above 
ourselves, Plato did not doubt, and we shall 
not : but that it is in this way that we shape 
our being, and in everything work toward an 
end. Scripture and reason prove." Habit is 
God's assent to the finality and responsi- 
bility of our acts. 

If it were not for habit, we should never 
have time or strength for any advanced liv- 
ing. *'If an act became no easier after being 
done several times,'' says Dr. Moudsley in 
"The Physiology of Mind," "if the careful 
direction of consciousness were necessary to 
its accomplishment on each occasion, it is 
evident that the whole activity of a lifetime 
might be confined to one or two deeds — that 
no progress could take place in development. 
A man might be occupied all day in dressing 
and undressing himself; the attitude of his 
body would absorb all his attention and 
energy; the washing of his hands or the 
fastening of a button would be as difficult 
to him on each occasion as to the child on 



12 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



its first trial, and he would furthermore be 
completely exhausted by his exertions/' 
We can make headway upward in our life 
struggle because each step is secure. We do 
not need to go back to do it over again with 
the same effort. We can go on from it easily 
to another step in the same direction. 

Of course, the law of habit, like every 
other law, is like a two-edged blade. It 
cuts both ways. The good that we have 
done once, we can do more easily the sec- 
ond time. The evil, also, that we have done 
once we can more easily repeat. 'T know 
from experience,'' says John Foster in his 
''JournaV ''that habit can, in direct opposi- 
tion to every connection of the mind and but 
little aided by the element of temptation 
(such as present pleasures, and so forth) in- 
duce a repetition of the most unworthy 
action. The mind is weak where it has 
once given way. It is long before a prin- 
ciple restored can become as firm as one that 
has never been moved. It is as the case of 
a mound of a reservoir : if the mound has 
in one place been broken, whatever care has 
been taken to make the repaired part as strong 
as possible, the probability is that if it gives 
way again, it will be in that place." The 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 13 



law of habit is meant to be a blessing to us 
in making us masters, not a curse in making 
us slaves. 

In the religious life, habit is meant to 
play a great and blessed part. *'In the great 
majority of things," says Foster, ''habit is a 
greater plague than ever afflicted Egypt : in 
religious character it is a grand felicity.'' 
By it we are set free from many conflicts 
which we had to wage earnestly at first but 
in which the habit of victory became so fixed 
that we are no longer aware of those conflicts. 
The foes wdiom we meet are still with us, 
but we give them no more thought than we 
give to the earth we walk on, and without 
which we could not stand up and w^alk for- 
ward. By habit also, what was at first hard 
and perplexing has become natural and 
simple. Surrender to Christ and the sub- 
ordination of our personal ambition to him, 
once difficult, is now joyous. The lower 
has been subjugated by the higher. "When 
the missionary desire came in and took full 
possession of my heart," says the veteran 
missionary, Griffith John, ''the lower desire 
was driven out and driven out never to re- 
turn again. That was a great victory, one 
of the irreatest victories ever won on the 



14 ■ A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



arena of my soul, and one for which I have 
never ceased to feel truly thankful to God." 
And the virtues and activities of the after 
life are sweet to us in their full sweetness, 
and secure and trustworthy only when they 
have become, as they may become, habitual. 
We should begin to acquire these habits 
at once, the earlier the better. If we do not 
learn to love God in our earliest years, and 
to trust him and to pray to him, if we do 
not become familiar with the Bible now, and 
now acquire a love for purity that will not 
look upon evil, it may be too late when in 
after years we turn to these things deciding 
to make them then habitual. AMiile no one 
need ever despair, it is true, as Professor 
James says, that habit ''dooms us all to fight 
out the battle of life upon the lines of our 
nurture or our early choice, and to make the 
best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there 
is no other for which we are fitted, and it is 
too late to begin again." The kind of Chris- 
tian we want some day to be, we must begin 
to be to-dav. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 15 



THE HABIT OF PRAYER 

THE most vital of all the habits of a 
Christian is the habit of prayer. 
This is the test of spiritual reality 
and strength. The man whose principles and 
character can be exposed to God, who loves 
to go to God, and who, though aware of his 
weakness and sin, ever rejoices to be searched 
through by the light of God in the fire of 
his presence, cannot be false. The man who 
does not seek and bear this testing of prayer, 
has no such sense of his own sin, of the 
reality of God's forgiveness and power and 
of the nearness of his presence to man, as 
will make his word to his fellow-men of 
deepest effect. ''Without much solitary com- 
munion with Jesus," says good Dr. ]\Iac- 
laren of Manchester, ''effort for him tends to 
become mechanical and. to lose the elevation 
of motive and the suppression of self which 
give it all its power. It is not lost time 
which the busiest worker, confronted with 
the most imperative calls for service, gives 
to still fellowship in secret with God. There 
can never be too much activity in Christian 
work, but there is often disproportioned ac- 



16 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



tivity, which is too much for the amount of 
time given to meditation and communion. 
This is one reason why there is so much 
sowing and so httle reaping in Christian 
work to-day." 

It is just as important that praying should 
become a habit with us, as breathing or eat- 
ing or sleeping, or dressing in the morning. 
If these things did not become habitual with 
us, life would soon break down under the 
burden of doing them. 

But they are all made natural and almost 
unconscious to us by practice, so that we do 
them all instinctively. Prayer, of course, can 
never become a habit which needs no at- 
tention, for prayer is the fixing of the at- 
tention upon God; but it can become per- 
fectly natural for us to do this, so natural 
that every instant our hearts will turn to 
God, referring all things to him and seeking 
his strength and peace. 

Those who are not in the habit of prayer 
at all times are not likely to make use of 
prayer even in special times. In very great 
crises, of course, they will probably do so. 
Even men who pay no heed to God and re- 
nounce prayer are likely, in the time of mor- 
tal peril, to pray. When the steamship Spree 



il 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 17 



broke its shaft some years ago while cross- 
ing the Atlantic, with Mr. Moody on board, 
and the passengers realized their danger, 
men who had shown no interest whatever in 
religion joined the group around Mr. Moody 
who prayed. But it is the men who habita- 
ally pray who know how to pray in such 
emergencies. If we learn from our earliest 
childhood to pray daily and hourly there will 
never come a time when we cannot turn to 
God with natural friendship and assurance, 
and tell him our wants and desires. 

For prayer is just converse with God, and 
all conversation requires practice. If men 
do not talk to one another, they lose the taste 
and faculty of conversation, and so, also, if 
men do not talk with God, they will not 
acquire the love and power of prayer. We 
can make constant converse with God the 
habit of our lives. We are more likely to 
do this if we think of God as Father, as 
Jesus encouraged us to do. If we think of 
him as some strange and distant monarch, 
or as a vague, pervasive spirit, we shall feel 
no disposition to speak to him as a man 
would speak to his friend, but if we realize 
that he is our personal Father, and our in- 
separable Companion, we shall naturally turn 



18 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



to him to share our pleasure in each new 
joy of Hfe, our dehght in all that is beautiful, 
to thank him for every blessing, to seek his 
guidance in every perplexity, and his com- 
fort and help in every sorrow and need. 

Such a habit, as Dr. Maclaren points out, 
is not inconsistent with work and energy. 
It is the best stimulus to work, and the great 
fountain of energy. It is the men of prayer, 
like Chinese Gordon and Stonewall Jack- 
son who were the great soldiers. As Gordon 
wrote to his sister : 

''I believe very much in praying for others ; 
it takes away all bitterness toward them. 
... If a man makes an arrangement with 
his fellow-man, the greatest honor to him 
is to consider that arrangement as effectual 
and final. So it is the great honor to our 
Lord to believe his word. It is not presump- 
tion to claim the fulfillment of his promises ; 
it is a comforting thought; indeed, it is 
peace, for we place our burden on him, who 
is both willing and able to bear it. The 
prayers of the patriarchs were most simple; 
they took God at his word, that is all. 

''I like much this style of prayer, and rec- 
ommend it to you : to plead with Christ to 
look after his own members. He knew all 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 19 



about those members, when he undertook the 
covenant. Surely, if he bore the punishment 
of our sins, as he did, he is not Hkely to 
neglect the fruit of his work. Why, the 
fact of his not doing so would be the triumph 
of his foes, and would be virtual failure; 
and we know that he could not fail. I 
am delighted with the prayer ; I only realized 
it lately — indeed a few days ago ; before that 
it was misty. I now ask him in some way 
to regulate matters for my earthly members, 
for they also are his. I really believe we 
shall enter the resurrection life by such 
prayers, and die to the world." 

And Jackson's biographer says of him : 
*'He prayed without ceasing, under fire 
as in the camp; but he never mistook his 
own impulse for a revelation of the divine 
will. He prayed for help to do his duty, 
and he prayed for success. He knew that 

More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of ; 

but he knew, also, that prayer is not al- 
ways answered in the way which man would 
have it. . . . Jackson's religion entered into 
every action of his life. No duty, however 
trivial, was begun without asking a blessing, 



20 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



or ended without returning thanks. He had 
long cultivated, he said, the habit of con- 
necting the most trivial and customary acts 
of life with a silent prayer." 

And in the time of peace as well as in war, 
the man of prayer is the man of action. His 
prayer is work. It effects things. No one 
felt this more than General Samuel Chap- 
man Armstrong, the founder of Hampton. 
'Trayer,'' said he, ''is the greatest thing in 
the world. It keeps us near to God — my 
own prayer has been most weak, wavering, 
inconstant, yet has been the best thing I 
have ever done. I think this is universal 
truth — what comfort is there in any but 
the broadest truth?" 

The earlier we can acquire the best habits, 
the better. As soon as children can talk, 
and even before, it is time to begin with 
them. But whether or not the habit was 
begun with us then, we have something to 
do ourselves, now, in strengthening it. We 
must have our set time, morning and even- 
ing, by grace at meals, by united prayer with 
others for the settlement and confirmation 
of our habit. And we need to associate the 
thought of prayer and to cultivate its prac- 
tice with all the various experiences of life. 






I 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 21 



The time that we so often cannot spend in 
any other work can be profitably spent in 
prayer — the hours while awake at night, and 
the moments during the day when often we 
can only sit still and pray. Maurice's wife 
said that she never knew her husband to 
wake up at night without praying. 

The habit of prayer will be strengthened 
with all of us w^ho will remember to pray 
after as well as before the events and ex- 
periences of life. Often we need to pray even 
more after some victory than before. We 
shall probably remember to pray after our 
defeat. Our humiliation and sense of need 
will drive us to God in shame of weakness 
and desire for strength. But when we suc- 
ceed we often forget God, and are content 
with what we think we have power in our- 
selves to do. In truth, we have no power 
in ourselves to do what w^e ought. All our 
power is of God, and it is suicidal to cut 
ourselves off from him — the one Source of 
life and righteousness and power. 

No habit of Jesus' life is more evident 
than his habit of prayer. It must have been 
begun in his earliest boyhood. It was the 
great comfort and strength of his life. We 
may not be able to make it mean to us what 



22 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



it meant to him, but without it we shall never 
find what he came to give — the life of strong, 
steadfast duty-doing, of love and peace and 
joy. Let us set about acquiring it now, and 
practice it every day and every hour. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 23 



THE HABIT OF DUTY. 1 

ONE of the most wonderful things in 
the life of our Lord was his habit 
of duty. How large a part it played 
with him is concealed from us because the 
word is so seldom used in our English trans- 
lation of the Gospels. The English word 
^'duty'' occurs only five times in the King 
James Version, and but once in the Gospels 
in the words of Jesus. '^Even so ye also, 
when ye shall have done all the things that 
are commanded you, say, We are unprofit- 
able servants; we have done that which it 
was our duty to do.'' But the absence of 
the term does not indicate the absence of 
the idea. Again and again the thought of 
duty is expressed by Christ when he says, 
*T must." That is not a verbal mood, but 
a separate word which might as appropri- 
ately be translated, 'Tt is my duty." 'Tt 
is my duty to be in my Father's house," was 
the first expression of the noble conscious- 
ness which was to dominate his career. 
When his ministry began and the enthusi- 
astic people of Capernaum would have kept 
him for their local prophet, he replied, *'It 



24 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



IS my duty to preach the good tidings of 
the kingdom of God to the other cities also : 
for therefore was I sent/' As the work of 
his pubHc ministry absorbed him, he said 
solemnly, ''It is our duty to work the works 
of him that sent me while it is day : the 
night cometh, when no man can work/' 
The great missionary duty of the divine love 
lay especially upon his heart and to this and 
the sacrifice by which it was to be ac- 
complished he often referred. ''Other sheep 
I have, which are not of this fold : them ^Iso 
it is my duty to bring/' "It is the duty of 
the Son of man to suffer many things, and 
be rejected . . . and be killed/' And the two 
great ideas are combined with the impli- 
cation of the Church's duty in the words of 
the Lord after his resurrection. "It was 
Christ's duty to suffer, and to rise again 
from the dead the third day; and [it is your 
duty to see] that repentance and remission 
of sins should be preached in his name unto 
all the nations/' From the first to the last 
a lofty sense of duty sustained the Son of 
God. 

The life of Paul was dominated by the 
same principle of duty. It was so in his anti- 
Christian earnestness: "I verily thought 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



with m3^self that it was my duty to do many 
things contrary to the name of Jesus of 
Nazareth." Nothing turned him aside from 
what he believed to be the path of duty. 
His conscience was serene on this point. He 
was ready to admit afterwards that his moral 
judgment had been terribly wrong in those 
days, and when he afterwards discovered 
how wrong it had been, he made every re- 
paration in his power, but he never regret- 
ted having made duty supreme. And as a 
persecutor, so as a missionary he bent his 
life with absolute devotion under his con- 
viction of duty. ''What do ye, weeping and 
breaking my heart?" he remonstrated with 
his friends in the house of Philip the 
Evangelist, in Csesarea, as they sought to 
dissuade him from the path of duty. ''I 
am ready not to be bound only, but also 
to die." With him it was anything for duty. 
It must be so with us. A rigid sense of 
duty is the noblest thing in life. It is nobler 
than love. For in its lower ranges love 
is tinged with selfishness, and when it rises 
above these ranges and is pure, untainted by 
any requirements of return, it melts into 
duty and becomes and remains the loftier 
love by virtue of the preservative purity of 



26 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



duty. Only duty can put eternity into love 
and lift it above all the vicissitudes and dis- 
appointments and betrayals of time. And, 
in fact, the Bible always grounds love upon 
duty. In it as in God, right is the supreme 
thing. God is love because he is right. And 
we are bidden to love because we ought. 
Duty and not affinity is the lofty motive of 
the soul. This was our Lord's teaching. 
**If ye love me, ye will keep my command- 
ments.'' But what is it to love him? *^Ye 
are my friends, if ye do the things which 
I command you.'' And the supreme duty 
he laid upon his disciples, the commandment 
he called ''new" was the duty of love. ''And 
this is his commandment," says John, "that 
we should . . . love one another. ... If 
God so loved us, it is our duty to. love one 
another." Love is not a mood or a caprice. 
It is a duty. It gets its greatness and its 
sovereignty from the soul of duty which is 
in it. There are sensitive souls which have 
tortured themselves because they could not 
serve from a sense of buoyant and joyous 
love. Christ does not ask it. He asks us 
to do our duty in the strength of God. We 
do not need to want to tell the truth, or to 
be unselfish, or to go as foreign missionaries. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 27 



It is good if we do feel a spontaneous joy 
in duty. But that is secondary. The duty is 
the supreme thing and the doing of it will 
produce the right feelings in time. If it 
does not, it is of little consequence, if only 
we have done steadily and honestly what it 
was our duty to do. For this, as it is the 
noblest element and the highest motive, is 
also the one adequate rule of life, ^'What 
is right?" "What ought I?" This and 
not temperament or taste, which may or 
may not be what they should, is the complete 
law of life and action and being. 

Obedience to the law of duty is th€ only 
way to clear up all our intellectual confusion 
and perplexities. ''Most true is it," says 
Carlyle in a familiar quotation, ''as a wise 
man teaches us 'that doubt of any sort can- 
not be removed except by action.' On which 
ground, too, let him who gropes painfully 
in darkness or uncertain light, and prays 
vehemently that the dawn may ripen into 
day, lay this other precept well to heart, 
which to us was of invaluable service. 'Do 
the duty that lies nearest thee,' which thou 
knowest to be a duty. Thy second duty will 
already have become clearer." This is cer- 
tainly a law throughout life. If I have doubt 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



as to my ability to learn to swim, I can never 
resolve the doubt by standing on the bank 
and arguing about it. It can only be cleared 
away by my going into the water and mak- 
ing the effort. And so in higher things. 
I can never settle the question of the ex- 
istence of God or the truth of Christianity, 
by speculation. Even if I am satisfied that 
the results of my speculation prove the ex- 
istence of God and the truth of Christianity, 
both God and Christianity will still be un- 
realities to me without action. I must ven- 
ture out upon God. I must put Christianity 
to the test of life. I must do my duty. And 
if I do my duty, even if my speculations may 
have baffled me^ I shall issue forth at last. 
Whoever wull do right for right's sake and 
follow this as a consuming principle will 
come through to God who is the Right. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 29 



THE HABIT OF DUTY. II 

DOXE steadily, as the law of life, duty 
prepares men for whatever tests life 
may bring. These tests, which are 
God's examinations of the soul, come with- 
out forewarning, and we may say reverently 
that there is no cramming for these ex- 
aminations of God. ''The man's whole life 
preludes the single deed.'' We do in the 
crisis what the hidden principles of our 
career have foredoomed. There are doubt- 
less exceptions, some real, some apparent, 
where a profligate life has flowered in a glori- 
ous self-sacrifice. But shirking duty in the 
common is no preparation for its perform- 
ance in the exceptional, and the man who 
meets his crisis when it comes is the man 
who made it sure he would meet it by the 
solid steadiness of his common duty-seeking 
and duty-doing. This is the path to power 
and to whatever greatness God has in mind 
for us. The writer of some dialect reminis- 
cences of Abraham Lincoln draws out this 
lesson from the early crisis in that great, plain 
man's life: 

*T hadn't been watchin' him sweatin' his 



30 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



brains on that question (of slavery) for four 
years without knowin'. I tell you nobody 
that didn't see him often them days, and 
didn't care enough about him to feel bad 
when he felt bad, can ever understand what 
Abraham Lincoln went through before his 
debates with Douglas. He worked his head 
day and night tryin' to get that slavery ques- 
tion figured out so nobody could stump him. 
Greatest man to think things out so nobody 
could git around him I ever see. Hadn't 
any patience with what wa'n't clear. What 
worried him most, I can see now, w^as makin' 
the rest of us understand it like he did. 
. ... I'd figured out by that time that Lincoln 
was a big man, a bigger man than Stephen 
A. Douglas. Didn't seem possible to me it 
could be so, but the more I went over it 
in my mind the more certain I felt about 
it. Yes, sir, Fd figvired it out at last what 
bein' big was, that it was bein' right, thinkin' 
things out straight and then hangin' on to 
'em because they was right. That was bein' 
big, and that was Abraham Lincoln all 
through — the whole of him.'' 

Doing duty in the small is the road of 
a man to character. Fret and tempest die 
out in the life which is solidified and calmed 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 31 



by duty. Consequences may be what they 
will — of what consequence is it ? Our course 
has been set for us, our star has been given 
us to steer by. The unseen Captain knows 
the rest. 

**The more we see of hfe/' wrote Chinese 
Gordon from Shanghai to his sister in 1880, 
''the more one feels disposed to despise one's 
self and human nature, and the more one 
feels the necessity of steering by the Pole 
Star, in order to keep from shipwrecks; in 
a word, live to God alone. If he smiles on 
you, neither the smile nor frown of man can 
affect you. Thank God, I feel myself, in a 
great measure^ dead to the world and its 
honors, glories and riches. Sometimes I 
feel this is selfish ; well, it may be so, I claim 
no infallibility, but it helps me on my way. 
Keep your eye on the Pole Star, guide your 
bark of life by that, look not to see how 
others are steering, enough it is for you 
to be in the right way." 

Peace and good conscience come from the 
unity of the life with duty, with the con- 
ception of life as duty, the vocation of God. 
It is nowhere more nobly put than in the 
closing paragraph of Trench's ''Study of 
Words," on "vocation" : 



32 ACHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



"What a calming, elevating, ennobling 
view of the tasks appointed us in this world, 
this word gives ! We did not come to our 
v/ork by accident; we did not choose it for 
ourselves; but, in the midst of much that 
may wear the appearance of accident and 
self-choosing, came to it, by God's leading 
and appointment. How will this consider- 
ation help us to appreciate justly the dignity 
of our work, though it were far humbler 
work, even in the eyes of men, than that of 
any one of us here present! What an as- 
sistance in calming unsettled thoughts and 
desires, such as would make us wish to be 
something else than that w^hich we are! 
What a source of confidence, when we are 
tempted to lose heart, and to doubt whether 
we shall carry through our work with any 
blessing or profit to ourselves or to others ! 
It is our S^ocation,' not our choosing, but 
our 'calling' ; and he who called us to it, 
will, if only we will ask him, fit us for it, 
and strengthen us in it." 

And, to speak of but one other thing, it 
is the law of duty which gives beauty to life. 
Sometimes we doubt. Duty seems harsh and 
domineering and gray. But it is only seem- 
ing. 



II 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 33 



I slept, and dreamed that life was Beaut}^; 
I woke, and found that life was Duty. 
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie? 
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly ; 
And thou shalt find thy dream to be 
A truth and noonday light to thee. 

It will be so because beauty is to be found 
in that which duty is, order, fixed principle, 
obedience to law. 

All these results of duty-seeing and duty- 
doing are illustrated in the lives of the men 
who have been known as men of duty. 
They were seen in Henry Lawrence, whose 
classic epitaph has nerved multitudes to fol- 
low the way he went: ''Here lies Henry 
Lawrence who tried to do his duty." They 
wxre seen in Chinese Gordon, whose last 
letter to his sister sent from Khartum ends : 
'T. S. I am quite happy, thank God, and, 
like Lawrence, I have 'tried to do my duty/ '' 
They were seen in the Duke of A\>llington, 
of whom one of Robert Louis Stevenson's 
favorite quotations said, "He did his duty 
as naturally as a horse eats oats." 

Soldiers are not the only men who have 
illustrated the iron supremacy of duty. Mis- 
sionaries have been even nobler representa- 
tives because all their obedience to duty was 
personal and moral. Human love, comfort 



34 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



and ambition have whispered to them m 
vain to turn back. Often deep disgust at 
the life in contact with which they had to 
Hve and racial antipathy too deep for any 
overcoming except the overcoming of duty, 
have protested, and perils like the soldier's 
perils have threatened — all in vain against 
duty. Nearer home the trained nurse is 
every day enduring and subduing what it is 
not the mood of sympathy or any impulse 
which enables her to meet, but duty only. 
I know of one who was called just after a 
serious illness of her own to what she sup- 
posed was some ordinary case of need, only 
to find that it was a poor home where three 
children were sick with scarlet fever and 
diphtheria. There were no servants. The 
mother had one of the children with her in 
the kitchen. The home was unclean. The 
bed given her was the bed in which one of 
the children had died and the bed clothing- 
had not been changed. She stayed and 
nursed the family. Why? For love's sake? 
Her soul revolted from the experience she 
was passing through. She stayed for duty 
and duty upheld her. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 35 



THE HABIT OF DUTY. HI 

A RECENT newspaper article detailing 
the enormous sacrifice of life in the 
industrial progress of Pittsburg bore 
the gruesome title, "Riches Soaked in 
Blood." In the first five months of 1907 
the coroner recorded one thousand and 
ninety-five deaths, of which three hundred 
and forty-four came suddenly and violently 
in the mills and railroads of the city. One 
life, it was declared, was sacrificed for every 
fifty thousand tons of coal shipped, one life 
for every seven thousand tons of iron and 
steel. Why were these men where death 
met them prematurely ? They were working 
for the support of their families or were 
simply busy with the necessary work of the 
world, and they died where duty placed them 
and doing what they thought they must. 
Somewhere along the line of the production 
of every fragment of the world's wealth is 
the blood of a man who fell in his duty with 
no cry to the world for its praise, but taking 
what came with his duty as a matter of 
course. 

How did duty get the power to dominate 



36 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



men in this way, and what enables it to assert 
its power against home and Hfe ? Because it 
is the call of right, and what right bids us 
to do it is wrong not to do. And right dra\ys 
its vital authority from God. God is the 
great personal, living Right, and duty is 
simply his voice. That is the lofty meta- 
phor of one of our greatest odes. Let each 
reader turn to -his Wordsworth, and read 
all of the ode of which these lines are a 
part : 

Stern Daughter of the Voice of God ! 

O Duty ! if that name thou love 
Who art a light to guide, a rod 

To check the erring, and reprove; 
Thou, who art victory and law 
When empty terrors overawe ; 
From vain temptations dost set free ; 
And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity! 

Through no disturbance of my 'soul. 

Or strong compunction in me wrought, 
I supplicate for thy control ; 

But in the quietness of thought : 
Me this unchartered freedom tires ; 
I feel the weight of chance desires : 
My hopes no more must change their name, 
I long for a repose that ever is the same. 

Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead's most benignant grace; 

Nor know we an3'thing so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face: 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



37 



Flowers laugh before time on their beds 
And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, 
are fresh and btrong. 

Because duty is the right thing, the will 
of God for man, it is sufficient. For its 
own sake alone, it asks to be done. Itself 
is its own reward. It asks no other, and 
there is surely something pitiful about our 
practice in these days of rewarding and 
decorating men for doing their duty. Why 
should they not? Is duty something it is 
wonderful to find a man doing, so wonderful 
that he should get extra pay for it or be given 
a ribboned medal? Surely Fielding's words 
in *'Tom Thumb the Great" are nobler: 

When I'm not thank'd at all, I'm thank'd enough ; 
I've done my duty, and I've done no more. 



It is simply our duty to do our duty. It 
is not the winning of a supererogatory merit 
with either God or man. It is not a mat- 
ter of reward. And it is not a matter of 
comparison with other men's achievements. 
Mr. Maydole, the hammer-maker, was an ex- 
pert. 'T have made hammers," he told Doc- 
tor Gannett once, ''for twenty-eight years." 



38 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



*'You ought to be able to make a pretty good 
hammer, then, by this time/' was the reply. 
"No, sir!'' came the emphatic answer. '*I 
never made a pretty good hammer — I make 
the best hammer in the United States." This 
was high, all but the comparison. Duty is 
not to do better than another man, but to do 
it all and to the limit on one's own line, for 
the eye of God, not for the comparing eye 
of man. But we live now in a competitive 
day. In school and university and life the 
rewards are all for exceeding other men. In- 
dustry is organized on that principle. Our 
athletics rest on competition with others or 
with the record of others. It may be doubted 
whether the good old times were as good 
as our own times, but the spirit attributed 
to them ought to be the spirit of all times. 

*'0 good old man, how well in thee appears 
The constant service of the antique world, 
When service sweat for duty, not for meed ! 
Thou art not for the fashion of these times, 
When none will sweat but for promotion." 

This high view of duty is our deep need. 
There is a place for all true sentiment, for 
temperament and inclination, but the place 
of control is for duty. We need to acquire 
the habit of doing the next thing as duty. 



I 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS ' 39 



Duty is ever with us and calling to us. It 
ought to be done by us simply because it is 
our duty until the thought of evading or 
shirking duty will never come to us and we 
do instinctively as though nothing else were 
possible that which is our duty. The habit 
of duty should become so fixed with us that 
we should see nothing but duty. There is 
a story of an archer who was teaching his 
art. The mark was a bird in a tree. ''What 
do you see?'' the archer asked the first man 
who came forward to shoot. 'T see a bird 
in a tree/' said he. ''Stand aside," said the 
archer. "What do you see?" he said to the 
second man. "I see a bird," replied he. 
"Stand aside,'' the archer said. "And what 
do you see?" he asked the third. "I see the 
head of a bird," said he. "Shoot," the archer 
cried. We should be blind to all that diverts 
or obscures. The things that deaden the 
sense of duty must have no place with us. 
The "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God" 
will endure no indulgences which stifle her 
word in our hearts. 

All duty can be done. What we ought 
to do is the only thing we can do, if we are 
what we ought to be. No right is impos- 
sible. "Let us have faith that right makes 



40 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



might," said Lincoln in his speech in New 
York in 1859, ''and in that faith let us dare 
to do our duty." It can be done, however 
impossible, just because it is our duty to 
do it. We must believe this if we have any 
ear for God at all, for, as Emerson wrote 
in lines inscribed on the wall of the school- 
room of the most efficient school for boys in 
America : 

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
V/hen Duty whispers low, Thou must, 

The youth replies, I can ! t 

''When I was a boy," said a man recently 
speaking to boys, "my father gave me a 
diary on Christmas at the close of a year 
in which I made changes in my life plans 
which were at the time a great shock and 
disappointment to him. He was a reticent 
man, so that when he did speak we heard. 
He said little about the matter, but in the 
diary he had written on the fly leaf, 'March 
on to duty.' If it led away from his desires, 
well and good, it was duty which was to 
be followed wheresoever it led." A new 
day will break in the Church and the world, 
in college and home, in public and private life 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 41 



when men ^^march on to duty/' unf rightened, 
unseduced, obedient, when they will say and 
live by their word, ^'It is my duty to be 
about my Father's business and to finish the 
work which he gave me to do." Those men 
will vanquish death and hell, and, after 
Christ, will build the walls of the kingdom 
which is righteousness and duty. 



42 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



THE HABIT OF GOOD THINKING 

'* TJ E was an essentially pure-minded 
j^ J[ man," said Edward Caird of his 
brother John Caird, the head of the 
University of Glasgow and one of the great- 
est speakers and scholars of his day, *'to 
whom no one could speak of anything doubt- 
ful or equivocal/' He was a thinking man 
and he thought of good things, and his good 
thinking shaped his character and gave him 
a good defense against all that was un- 
worthy and base. Such things stayed away 
from the man whose mind was always busy 
and always clean. 

This habit of good thinking is one of the 
most necessary habits to acquire. We have 
to think. We can only choose what we will 
think about and how we will think, whether 
carefully and consecutively or in disorder 
and at random. What we think about is the 
first thing. 'T don't know what to do,'' said 
a student in one of our colleges. *^My father 
is one of the best of men and my grandfather 
was a noble man before him, and yet I have 
such bad thoughts in my mind. I am 
ashamed of them, and I want to get rid of 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 43 



them/' There is good hope that the boy 
who is ashamed of bad thoughts can get rid 
of them. If we despise them, and try to 
make it uncomfortable for them, they will 
soon go away of their own accord. And we 
can do this best, not by dwelling upon the 
wrong thoughts, but by refusing to dwell 
upon them, by turning the mind, instead, at 
once to good things. '^Try thinking about 
Christ whenever a bad thought comes," one 
friend advised another as they sat and talked 
under the trees on a hill overlooking a river 
in North Carolina. ^'Let me hear how the 
plan works after you have tried it.'' In due 
time he had the simple answer : *T have tried 
it. It works." 

Each one of us should have a stock of 
good thoughts — of places where we have 
been, of great games we have seen or played 
in, of rivers where we have fished or forests 
we have hunted in, of great men we have 
seen, of books we have read, of bits of poetry 
or pictures of real deeds of heroism, or of 
problems of life or politics. These we should 
have at hand, so as to be able to draw on 
them at any moment, and thus never 
be alone with only wasteful or harmful 
thoughts. And each time we have to make 



44 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



a choice between the thoughts that help and 
those that harm, we need only say, ''Now 
which thoughts are the right ones?" and 
think those alone. 

But some say that it is hard to control 
thought. It is at first. That is why the 
law of habit must be used in the matter of 
thoughts. Character will show itself in the 
firm control of our thoughts, and on the 
other hand, the firm control of our thoughts 
Avill breed solid character. We can see this 
clearly in Mr. Gladstone. ''Character," says 
Mr. John Morley in the "Life of Gladstone," 
"as has often been repeated, is completely 
fashioned will, and this superlative require- 
ment, so indispensable for every man of 
action in whatever walk and on whatever 
scale, was eminently Mr. Gladstone's. From 
force of will, with all its roots in habit, ex- 
ample, conviction, purpose, sprang his lead- 
ing and most efifective qualities. He was 
never very ready to talk about himself, but 
when asked what he regarded as his master 
secret, he always said, 'Concentration.' 
Slackness of mind, vacuity of mind, the 
wheels of the mind revolving without biting 
the rails of the subject, were insupportable. 
Such habits were of the family of faint- 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 45 



heartedness, which he abhorred. Steady 
practice of instant, fixed, effectual attention, 
was the key ahke to his rapidity of appre- 
hension and to his powerful memory. In 
the orator's temperament, exertion is often 
followed by a reaction that looks like indo- 
lence. This w^as never so with him. By in- 
stinct, by nature, by constitution, he was a 
man of action in all the highest senses of a 
phrase too narrowly applied and too nar- 
rowly construed. The currents of daimonic 
energy seemed never to stop, the vivid sus- 
ceptibility to impressions never to grow dull. 
He was an idealist, yet always applying ideals 
to their purposes in act. Toil was his native 
element; and though he found himself pos- 
sessed of many inborn gifts, he was never 
visited by the dream so fatal to many a w^ell- 
laden argosy, that genius alone does all. 
There was nobody like him when it came 
to difficult business, for bending his whole 
strength to it, like a mighty archer string- 
ing a stiff bow." We do not have the sort 
of mind Mr. Gladstone had, but we can ap- 
ply his principles to such minds as we have. 
And, indeed, it is not great and original 
thoughts which need to constitute the stuff 
on which we keep our minds at work. What 



1 



46 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



we need is to bring our common experi- 
ences and necessities under the conscious 
dominance of simple religious convictions. 
We shall find problems enough here to tax 
us and to give our minds all the occupation 
they are capable of. Even so great a man 
as John Caird found it so. 'The difficulty 
you talk of is a most real one/' he wrote. 
''I mean that of bringing principles to bear 
on the common trials and petty anxieties of 
daily life. Theoretical affliction and submis- 
sion in a book, or in our solemn and some- 
times formal words in prayer, are very dif- 
ferent things from that homely, rugged, 
hard-featured thing that meets us in the face, 
when we come down from the clouds to the 
world of realities, the world of headaches 
and heartaches, of coarse, uncongenial con- 
tacts and intercourses. But this is our trial, 
and the trial which, since the age of perse- 
cution is passed away, is perhaps the most 
common and the most difficult to which a 
Christian is subjected. I know no hope for 
it but perseverance and prayer. It is the old 
thought of great principles and small duties 
and trials, and I need not descant upon it to 
you. But I am quite convinced that Chris- 
tian advancement consists in nothing so much 



n 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 47 



as a habit, acquired by long effort and after 
many struggles and failures, of bringing high 
religious motive and feeling to bear on the 
common incidents of life. Don't you envy 
that state of mind where this has ceased to 
be a work of effort and conscious toil, when 
duty becomes a delight, God's presence con- 
stantly realized without endeavor, and so 
his service perfect freedom?" This is what 
comes to those who do bring all their 
thoughts under control of the obedience of 
Christ. 
^ * We can help ourselves to acquire the habit 

of good thinking by persisting in seeing al- 
ways first the good in people and in things. 
And we can help ourselves to seeing the 
good by refusing to speak of the evil unless 
it is clearly necessary to do so. We do not 
need to fall into the moral slovenliness of 
the lines which declare that there is so much 
bad in the best of us, and so much good in 
the worst of us, that it scarcely behooves any 
of us to speak ill of the rest of us. There is 
ill which needs to be spoken of and spoken 
against. But for the most part it is the 
good which needs to be brought out, and 
we can easily find it and bring it out if we 
wish. Acquiring the habit of doing this 



48 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



will react upon our thoughts, and we shall 
have our minds filled with what is pure and 
worthy and of good report. 

No habit can give more pleasure at all 
times than the habit of good thinking. When 
we are with others it will be the source and 
ally of the habit of unselfish service, and 
when we are alone and have no opportunity 
to serve others, we can be glad and content 
alone because we have always satisfying re- 
sources with us. At night, when we lie 
awake, we are not unemployed. Old Dr. 
Samuel T. Spear said that he would go over 
in his mind, as he lay awake, whole books 
of the Bible. And those whose storehouse 
is less richly supplied than his, should still 
have enough there for all hours of solitude. 
The treasure of good thoughts is better than 
all other wealth. 

We can begin to acquire the habit of good 
thinking at once if we do not have it already. 
The moment we lay down this book we 
can begin to recall the lessons we learned 
from it. We can review these in our minds, 
talk them over with the first people we meet, 
and begin at once to practice them in our 
own lives. We can be on the watch and 
not allow any vagrant thoughts to creep in 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 49 



and lull the mind into indolence. When the 
evening comes we can read some good book 
and turn it over in our thought as we get 
ready for rest. In the morning when we 
awake, we can turn our minds at once to 
the last thought of the evening before, and 
then, to the principles by which we are to 
live the new day. A few days of discipline 
like this will set our minds toward good 
ways, and by patient continuance in good 
thoughts, we shall soon have the habit of 
them and the peace and strength which come 
with a mind established in the love and 
practice of what is good alone. 



50 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



THE HABIT OF WISE SPENDING 

** T DON'T see why it is wrong to gamble 
2 at cards," said a student in one of our 
colleges. ''On what ground is it 
wrong? I do not lose more than I can af- 
ford to lose and I like the excitement which 
I get for the money." ''Well," said his 
friend, ''I think I see several reasons why it 
is wrong, but it seems to me that it is enough 
to say that it is a silly way to spend money. 
You don't really get anything in return for 
it. And it is not only silly, it is wickedly 
wasteful. W'hen there are in every one of 
our cities, agencies for the care of destitute 
children and for all kinds of benevolent and 
useful service, cramped and straitened for 
funds, when you remember how much good 
money can do, I think a man has no right 
to waste his money in gambling." We have 
no more right to spend wrongly than we have 
to acquire -wrongly. 

This question of the wise spending of our 
money is fundamental. It is a question of 
the spending of our life, or of some one's 
life. For money is life. As Dr. Schauffler 
said once in an address : 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 51 



''Money is myself. I am a laboring man, 
we will say, and can handle a pickax, and 
I hire myself out for a week at two dollars 
a day. At the close of the week I get twelve 
dollars and I put it in my pocket. What is 
that twelve dollars? It is a week's worth of 
my muscle put into greenbacks and pocketed ; 
that is, I have a week's worth of myself in 
my pocket. 

''Now, the moment you understand this, 
you begin to understand that money in your 
pocket is not merely silver and gold, but is 
something human, something that is instinct 
with power, because it represents power ex- 
pended. (If you are not earning any money 
of your own, and your father is support- 
ing you, then you are carrying that much 
of your father around in your pocket.) 
Now money is like electricity; it is stored 
power, and it is only a question as to where 
that power is to be loosed. 

"Do you see what a blessed, what a solemn 
thing this giving is, this giving of my stored 
self to my Master? Surely we need, in the 
matter of giving, consecrated thought as to 
where to loose ourselves, earnest prayer in 
the guidance of the choice of where to loose 
our stored power, and earnest prayer to God 



52 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



to add his blessing to the loosed personality 
in this money that I have sent abroad, that 
there may come a tenfold increase because 
of my personal power that I have sent/' 
What is true of giving is true of all spend- 
ing. We have no right to be reckless of 
human life, and yet we are reckless of life 
when we spend money recklessly. 

The question of saving is simply the ques- 
tion of spending. Industry and frugality are 
the simple rules of prosperity. '^In order to 
secure my credit and character as a trades- 
man," says Benjamin Franklin in his shrewd 
autobiography, ^T took care not only to be 
in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid 
the appearances to the contrary.'' On these 
two principles he constantly lays emphasis. 
Of his printing business in Philadelphia he 
writes : 

*'My circumstances, however, grew daily 
easier. My original habits of frugality con- 
tinuing, and my father having, among his 
instructions to me when a boy, frequently 
repeated a proverb of Solomon, 'Seest thou 
a man diligent in his business? he shall 
stand before kings; he shall not stand be- 
fore mean men,' I thence considered industry 
as a means of obtaining wealth and distinc- 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 53 



tion, which encouraged me, though I did 
not think that I should ever Hterally stand 
before kings, which, however, has since hap- 
pened ; for I have stood before five, and even 
had the honor of sitting down with one, the 
King of Denmark, to dinner." 

The fifth and sixth among the virtues he 
set out to acquire were : 

^'Frugality — Alake no expense but to 
do good to others or yourself ; that is, waste 
nothing. 

^'Industry — Lose no time ; be always em- 
ployed in something useful; cut off all un- 
necessary actions." 

He tells us of his 'Toor Richard's Alma- 
nac" : 

*T filled all the little spaces that occurred 
between the remarkable days in the calendar, 
with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as 
inculcated industry and frugality, as the 
means of procuring wealth, and thereby se- 
curing virtue; it being more difficult for a 
man in want to act always honestly, as, to 
use here one of those proverbs, Tt is hard 
for an empty sack to stand upright.' " 

To be rich is no high ambition, but each 
of us not only may, but ought to strive to 
be independent and to provide for others de- 



54 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



pendent upon us. And the way to do this 
which is open to us is not the earning of 
large sums of money, but the saving of small 
sums. If we stop the leaks, the supply will 
grow. What we thus save is not our treas- 
ure. That is to be laid up ^Svhere neither 
moth nor rust doth consume, and where 
thieves do not break through nor steal." If 
what we save becomes our treasure w^e are 
doing wrong. But we are not doing our 
duty if we carelessly let all that comes to us 
slip loosely away and do nothing to prepare 
for our future needs and those of others. 
Nothing in Old Testament or New excuses 
any of us from the duties of industry and 
frugality. 

The virtue of simplicity in spending is 
rarer now than it was in an earlier day. Then 
the very conditions of life in our country 
forced upon the people, except a few, a much 
sterner economy and more frugal manage- 
ment than is usual now. Families then prac- 
ticed both, cultivated an energy and a sim- 
plicity wHich constituted in many a home the 
finest school of character to be found, and 
extracted from hard conditions a comfort- 
able subsistence to the old, and a hard-bought 
education to the young. In Mrs. Cheney's 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 55 



life of her father, Horace Bushnell, there 
is a beautiful picture of such a home, and 
Horace Bushnell himself has described, in 
a noble speech on "The Age of Homespun," 
the frugality of the home : 

'Tt was also a great point, in this home- 
spun mode of life, that it imparted exactly 
what many speak of only with contempt, 
a closely girded habit of economy. Har- 
nessed, all together, into the producing pro- 
cess, young and old, male and female, from 
the boy that rode the plow horse to the 
grandmother knitting under her spectacles, 
they had no conception of squandering lightly 
what they all had been at work, thread by 
thread, and grain by grain, to produce. They 
knew too exactly what everything cost, even 
small things, not to husband them carefully. 
Men of patrimony in the great world, there- 
fore, noticing their small way in trade or 
expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to 
charge them with meanness, simply because 
they knew things only in the small; or, 
what is not far different, because they were 
too simple and rustic to have any conception 
of the big operations by which other men 
are wont to get their money without earning 
it, and lavish the more freely because it was 



56 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



not earned. Still, this knowing life only in 
the small, it will be found, is really anything 
but meanness/' 

Many of the strongest and best men of 
our country came from such homes and re- 
gret that their children will not have the 
strong discipline of their fathers. 

Occasionally a strong man who did not 
grow up in such a homespun home has never- 
theless a character of exactness and sim- 
plicity and the will and wisdom to strive to 
pass it on to his children. In Mr. Morley's 
''Life of Gladstone/' a let^r of Mr. Glad- 
stone's to his son is printed, revealing the 
man who wrote, and counseling with sound 
sense, the younger man who was in college 
at Oxford at the time : 

''i. To keep a short journal of principal 
employments in each day; most valuable as 
an account book of the all-precious gift of 
Time. 

"2. To keep also an account book of re- 
ceipt and expenditure ; and the least trouble- 
some way of keeping it is to keep it with 
care. This done in early life, and carefully 
done, creates the habit of performing the 
great duty of keeping our expenditure (and 
therefore our desires) within our means. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 57 



*'3. Read attentively (and it is pleasant 
reading) Taylor's Essay on Money, which, 
if I have not done it already, I will give you. 
It is most healthy and most useful reading. 

''4. Establish a minimum number of hours 
in the day for study, say seven at present, 
and do not, without reasonable cause, let it 
be less; noting down against yourself the 
days of exception. There should also be a 
minimum number for the vacations, which 
at Oxford are extremely long. 

''5. There arises an important question 
about Sundays. Though we should to the 
best of our power avoid secular work on 
Sundays, it does not follow that the mind 
should remain idle. There is an immense 
field of knowledge connected with religion, 
and much of it is of a kind that w^ill be of 
use in the schools and in relation to your 
g^eneral studies. In these davs of shallow 
skepticism, so widely spread, it is more 
than ever to be desired that we should 
be able to give a reason for the hope that 
is in us. 

''6. As to duties directly religious, such 
as daily prayer in the morning and evening, 
and daily reading of some portion of the 
Holy Scripture, or as to the holy ordinances 



58 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



of the gospel, there is little need, I am con- 
fident, to advise you; one thing, however, 
I would say, that it is not difficult, and it 
is most beneficial, to cultivate the habit of 
inwardly turning the thoughts to God, 
though but for a moment in the course, or 
during the intervals of our business; which 
continually presents occasions requiring his 
aid and guidance. 

''Turning again to ordinary duty, I know 
no precept more wide or more valuable than 
this : cultivate self-help ; do not seek nor 
like to be dependent upon others for what you 
can yourself supply ; and keep down as much 
as you can the standard of your wants, for 
in this lies a great secret of manliness, true 
wealth, and happiness ; as, on the other hand, 
the multiplication of our wants makes us 
efifeminate and slavish, as well as selfish. 

'Tn regard to money as well as to time, 
there is a great advantage in its methodical 
use. Especially is it wise to dedicate a cer- 
tain portion of our means to purposes of 
charity and religion, and this is more easily 
begun in youth than in after life. The great- 
est advantage of making a little fund of this 
kind is that when we are asked to give, the 
competition is not between self on the one 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 59 



hand and charity on the other, but between 
the different purposes of rehgion and charity 
with one another, among which we ought to 
make the most careful choice. It is desirable 
that the fund thus devoted should not be less 
than one tenth of our means; and it tends 
to bring a blessing on the rest." 

Such care and frugality, as Bushnell said, 
are not meanness. They are simple honesty. 
Some people think that all spending is good 
because it promotes business, and that even 
extravagance has its excuse in providing 
labor for those who minister to it. But there 
is bad and wasteful spending as well as good 
and helpful spending. Money that is at work 
employing men at useful production is doing 
more than money that is lavished on frills 
and whims whose manufacture can only be 
capricious. 

Some people want whatever they see. 
Children are constantly longing for whatever 
they have not, but see pictures of, or find 
that other children have. And many 
grown-up people are like children in this. If 
they have money they spend it without look- 
ing forward and asking w^iether there is 
not some better use to make of it or some 
greater need to be met. But having- money 



I 



60 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



is no reason for throwing it away. It is 
ours to be used sacredly as a trust. And 
worse than all this waste of what we have, 
is the folly of some who spend what they 
have not, incurring obligations which they 
cannot discharge. The honest man cannot 
understand how the dishonest or reckless man 
can do this, or how doing it, he can hold up 
his head among his fellows. The duty of 
wise spending requires us to live within 
what money we have, and not to spend what 
we do not have. 

Wt shall only use money wisely when we 
can do so habitually, when the right use of 
each dollar and of each cent of each dollar 
is a law of our nature. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 61 



THE HABIT OF HOPEFULNESS 

TO be a dreamer and a visionary is to 
lay one's self open, in this practical 
day, to some scorn and reproach. 
''Oh, come now, be practical," is the way we 
are met if we wander away from things as 
they are, or seem to expect more from men 
than ordinary give-and-take conduct. The 
reformer in politics is laughed at and told 
that men are what they are and that they 
must be dealt with as we find them; that 
they are not open to high patriotic consider- 
ations, but must be moved by motives potent 
on their level; that the dream of a purified 
state in which men shall act disinterestedly 
for the good of the nation is a mere imprac- 
tical dream. The purist in business seems to 
masses of men to be the same sort of vision- 
ary. *'You cannot be a Christian in business," 
some man says, ''and succeed. If you want 
to succeed you must act, not on the Golden 
Rule of the gospel, but on David Harum's 
version of it, 'Do to the other fellow what 
he intends to do to you and do it first.' " 
Altruism, consideration for others who do 
not take care of themselves and hold their 



62 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



own, has no place in the business world, these 
men argue. The man who believes in an 
order of love, of thinking first of his broth- 
er's interests and only afterwards of his 
own, such a man may be good material for 
citizenship in heaven, but he is not adapted 
to membership in the industrial society of 
this age. And the world smiles in the same 
way at the idealist in the Church, the man 
who believes in the unity of the Church and 
wdio longs to see that unity realized visibly, 
who wants to see Christ's followers follow 
Christ, who does not see why the command 
of Christ which he said was fundamental, 
the command to love one's brother better 
than one's self, cannot be fulfilled, inside the 
Church, at least. All these are victims, the 
world thinks, victims of a groundless hope. 
The world looks at them as Joseph's broth- 
ers looked at him. ''Go to," it says, ''let us 
hear what this dreamer says." Only it has 
not as much time as Joseph's brothers had 
and it soon loses patience and leaves the 
dreamers to compare their dreams, while 
it goes on its practical way. 

Nevertheless the dreamers have caught the 
true Christian secret of hope. On the day 
of Pentecost, Peter pointed out that what had 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 63 



happened that day carried its own evidence 
with it, for it had been foretold by the 
prophets that when the Spirit of God should 
come, the old men should dream dreams and 
the young men should see visions. The peo- 
ple of the true light would be visionaries and 
dreamers. The old Hebrew ideal had been 
the ideal of the seer, the man who could 
look on to the greater things. The supreme 
habit which the nation acquired during the 
centuries of its education was the habit of 
hope, of expectation of the Messiah and of 
golden age. When the Messiah came, the 
Jews failed to recognize him and soon lost 
this hope which passed on to the Christians. 
The Christians now became the people of the 
dream, the men and women who saw the 
higher and the better things and believed 
they could exist here and now. Christianity 
proved itself to be of God by the brave way 
in which it closed its eyes to what prevented 
the coming of the best things in individual 
hearts and in the world by its blindness to 
the despair of the world and by its confident 
assertion that there was an order of God, 
that men could and must find it and that the 
kingdom of God must be on the earth. It 
would not be discouraged or defeated. God 



64 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



lives, it said, and the world is his and he must 
have it and rule it, and even that which 
troubles men and seems to them unintelligible 
has some meaning which will some day ap- 
pear. Through it good is to be wrought out 
and hope fulfilled. 

Without hope scarcely anything that we 
possess that is really worth while would have 
come to us. All that is in fact, was first in 
some one's hope before it ever came to be 
in fact. The world itself existed in the 
hope of God before it came really to be. 
*'By faith," says the writer of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, ''we understand that the 
worlds have been framed by the Avord of 
God, so that what is seen hath not been made 
out of things which appear." In science the 
habit of hopefulness is absolutely indis- 
pensable. The man of science with a great 
problem, if he assumed that the problem could 
not be solved and refused to try any appar- 
ently hopeful solution of it, would never 
make any progress. All progress is made in 
science through the use of the ''working 
hypothesis," and the "working hypothesis" 
is only the hope of a solution to be fovmd 
along a certain line. If that hope is disap- 
pointed the real investigator tries another and 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 65 



another and another. He will never give up 
hope. It is the necessary habit of his mind. 
It is so also in art and architecture and 
poetry. What is wrought out by the artist, 
the architect, the poet, is what he first hoped 
and dreamed, what he saw in the far-ofif 
reachings of his mind. In exploration it is 
hope alone that sustains men, the hope of 
the new land to be discovered, a new moun- 
tain or lake to be found or a river source at 
last to be traced up. Without an irrepres- 
sible hope in the soul there could have been 
no Livingstone, no Whitman, no Columbus. 

How in God's name did Columbus get over 

Is a pure wonder to me, I protest, 
Cabot, and Raleigh too, that well-read rover, 
Frobisher, Dampier, Drake, and the rest. 

Bad enough all the same. 

For them that after came, 

But, in great heaven's name. 

How he should ever think 

That on the other brink 
Of this wild waste, terra firma should be, 
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me. 

How a man ever should hope to get thither, 

E'en if he knew that there was another side; 
But to suppose he should come any whither, 
Sailing straight on into chaos untried. 
In spite of the motion 
Across the whole ocean, 



66 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



To stick to the notion 

That in some nook or bend 

Of a sea without end 
He should find North and South America, 
Was a pure madness, indeed I must say, to me. 

What if wise men had, as far back as Ptolemy, 
Judged that the earth like an orange was round, 
None of them ever said, ''Come along, follow me. 
Sail to the west, and the east will be found." 

Many a day before 

Ever they'd come ashore. 

From the ''San Salvador," 

Sadder and wiser men 

They'd have turned back again; 
And that he did not, but did cross the sea, 
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me. 

Even when things seem to happen, they 
happen to the seekers, the seers, the men 
of hope. 

All social, intellectual and moral progress 
results from the hope of better things than 
the things that are. A vision is a rent in 
the sky, a breach in the wall, a gateway 
through which the larger things pour in. 
The dreamer is he whom Von Sturmer de- 
scribes in his lines in Richard Jeffries' ''Story 
of My Heart" : 

Dim woodlands made him wiser far 

Than those who thresh their barren thought 
With flails of knowledge dearly bought, 

Till all his soul shone like a star 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 67 



That flames at fringe of heaven's bar, 
Where breaks the surge of space unseen 
Against Hope's veil that hangs between 

Love's future and the woes that are. 



There are men who reahze that nothing that 
is can be accepted as the final thing until at 
last the perfect is come, the longed-for and 
hoped-for best thing of God. 

The strength of life is to be found in the 
depth and height of our hopes. Garibaldi 
and Mazzini dreamed of an Italy united and 
free and were strong to lead and achieve 
because the hope they cherished held them 
so firmly. And Horace Bushnell was so great 
a preacher because the habit of a mighty hope 
in the gospel enthralled his soul. He saw 
great things in God, and what he saw in God 
he strove to bring out in speech for men. 
All great preachers must be men of hope. 
The world cannot be won to despair. It is 
true that great multitudes of men hold to 
hopeless religions like Buddhism, but they 
cannot hold to them contentedly. The out- 
reaching of the soul for larger and better 
things cannot easily be suppressed. Men are 
waiting for a hopeful word, and the religion 
and the preachers who can speak it to them 
control the future. All great leaders of men 



68 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



must have somewhere to lead men. Their 
goal must be a hope, and the courage and 
patience of all struggle will depend on the 
faith and strength of our forward dream. A 
man without resources of his own takes up 
a tunnel scheme which has failed and by the 
indomitable perseverance of his hope enlists 
other men and means, and the enterprise 
which connects two great states by a tunnel 
under a great river is at once called after 
his name by the public which benefits by 
the victory of his hopefulness. The assur- 
ance that he would find that which he sought 
carried Livingstone through hardship enough 
to destroy any ordinary man of hopeless 
heart. Paul dreamed of a universal Church, 
and his hope accomplished itself over every 
obstacle of race and language. The hope 
that the Campbells would come, and a half- 
demented girl's conviction that they were 
coming and that she heard their pipers, up- 
held the men at Lucknow, whom nothing but 
hope could save, until Havelock came. Our 
own teachers would have given us up long 
ago if it were not for their hope that in spite 
of ourselves we could become something. 

The best things of our lives are not our 
possessions, but our hopes. We can be bet- 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 69 



ter men and women than we are. The 
divinest reaHties are the purposes of God 
for us which are not yet fulfilled, which are 
among our distant hopes. And in these 
hopes the comfort of life is to be found, the 
things which we have not attained as yet 
and cannot understand, but to which we hope 
to come. Our hymns and poems tell us this : 

Far, far away, like bells at evening pealing, 
The voice of Jesus sounds o'er land and sea ; 

And laden souls, by thousands meekly stealing, 
Kind Shepherd, turn their weary steps to thee. 

So Faber puts it and so does Newman : 

So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still 

Will lead me on 
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till 

The night is gone ; 
And with the morn those angel faces smile. 
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile. 

And so F. W. H. Myers, in "St. Paul" : 

What can we do o'er w^hom the unbeholden 
Hangs in a night with which we cannot cope? 
What but look sunward and with faces golden 
Speak to each other softly of a hope. 

No habit, after the habit of truth, is more 
necessary to man than the habit of hope. 
Whether or not we can acquire that habit will 
determine for us whether we shall be strong 
and glad, and leaders of men to better things. 



70 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



THE HABIT OF DOING THINGS 
NOW 

IN his book entitled "The Happy Life," 
ex-President Eliot of Harvard quotes 
the question of Emerson, asking what 
use immortality would be to a man who does 
not know how to live half an hour. Im- 
mortality, in the popular view, is just an 
endless number of half hours tied together, 
one after the other. What would a man 
do with a million of them who did not know 
what to do with one? And of what use to 
anyone will be a great, long-dreamed-of op- 
portunity for heroism or service, unless prep- 
aration has been made for it by such heroism 
and service in the things that went before? 
All these questions only bring out clearly the 
true principle of life; namely, that living 
now is the only living, that we ought to use 
rightly each moment and fill it full of true 
work and duty-doing. 

This is the only sensible and workable 
principle. Any other is impossible. You 
cannot speak two words at the same time and 
you cannot do two acts, each requiring the 
whole personality, at once. There is no way 



1 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 71 



in which we can pull back into the present 
an hour that is past, to do its work over 
again, and there is no way in which we can 
draw down into the present an hour out of 
the future, in order to live it now. Living 
now is the only living. Thinking of past 
life or of life to come is not living. The 
chance to live goes by while w^e are thinking 
about it. We cannot break off an immense 
achievement and do it at any one given time. 
We can only live one moment at a time and 
do at one time the work that can be put in 
one. moment. Life ceases to be such a com- 
plicated and impracticable thing when we 
realize this and are willing to live moment 
by moment. 

It is vitally important that we should 
realize that the law of life is living now. The 
kind of life we are living is producing the 
sort we shall live forever. We may well 
believe that death brings a mighty change, 
but it' is a change of sphere and of condition, 
not of character. We shall be what we are. 
The kind of things we do now and the way 
we do them now will not suddenly undergo 
a change. We shall keep right on. The 
boy or girl who is now negligent and shift- 
less and untruthful is likely to go on living 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



SO in the future. If any boy or girl is prompt, 
alert, faithful now, the habit of using life 
for living, of doing things in the only time 
we ever have to do them in, namely, now, 
will get so established that the boy or girl 
will go right on, really living always. 

And this plan is the restful one. It saves 
us from the dread, the paralyzing intimida- 
tion and surrender of the soul on account of 
life's bigness. We realize that we do not 
have to live our years all at once, that all that 
we have to do is the one thing that we can 
do, merely live our lives a bit at a time. And 
so we save ourselves also from the miseries 
of memory and the terrors of our imagination 
of the future by the simple plea of being 
absorbed in present duty. Xine tenths of 
the wretchedness of our lives does not spring 
from the present. It springs from brooding 
over the past and the things in the past 
which are beyond recall, or it comes from 
apprehensions of the future, most of which 
never arrive. In other words, we lose our 
lives in thinking of how we did live or failed 
to live in the past, or how we will live in the 
future. But this is missing the chance to 
live, and so we die under the thoughts of 
life. This is why life grows so uneasy and 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 73 



fretful. Let us stop all this and spend each 
moment in really living. 

By doing this we acquire power for future 
living. Lamentation about the quality of 
our past living or great purposes about future 
living will only weaken us unless they are 
expressed in a better and firmer quality of 
present living. And if we get into the habit 
of Hving strongly now we shall live that 
way hereafter without thinking about it. If 
we do the things that ought to be done now, 
we shall do them then. The great authori- 
ties in any department are the men who grew 
into authority gradually. They did what 
each moment brought to them, and so, after 
a while, no moment brought to them any- 
thing which they could not do. The world 
soon found that out, and straightway began 
to bring everything in their line to them. 
''We become authorities and experts in the 
practical and scientific spheres," writes one 
who was himself an authority, an expert, ''by 
so many separate acts and hours of work. 
Let no youth have any anxiety about the up- 
shot of his education, whatever the line of 
it may be. If he keeps faithfully busy each 
hour of the working day, he may safely leave 
the final result to itself. He can with per- 



74 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



feet certainty count on waking up some fine 
morning to find himself one of the competent 
ones of his generation in whatever pursuit 
he may have singled out. Silently, among 
the details of his business, the power of judg- 
ing in all that class of matter will have built 
itself up within him as a possession that will 
never pass away.'' 

In this way also life achieves results. 
National greatness is a product of slow edu- 
cation, not of great efforts. Germany and 
the United States and Japan have forged 
ahead of other nations as they have, not be- 
cause of national energy or of any sudden 
effort, but as the result of a careful and 
thorough public-school system which has 
trained the people. No emergency effort on 
the part of other nations can offset this ad- 
vantage. They will have to begin now where 
we began years ago and do some living in 
the present, instead of spending time dream- 
ing of the past or the future. And with in- 
dividuals as with nations, results are sums 
in arithmetic. The big, personal tasks, 
whether in character or in work, are not 
done wholesale, but are built up piece by 
piece, just as the little coral insects build the 
reefs or the ants their huge mounds. *'Do 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



things now," is the way to get many and 
great things clone. 

But while this principle is the key to the 
achievement of great results, it is not the 
greatness of the results which is of signifi- 
cance, but the spirit and purpose and the pro- 
cess which produced them. A political writer 
has recently compared Gladstone, Bismarck 
and Cavour to the disadvantage of Gladstone 
on the ground that he erected no new state 
as each of the others did. But the results of a 
man's work are dependent upon the circum- 
stances and materials in the midst of which 
his life fell. Not what it added up to, but 
how he lived it, how faithfully, persistently, 
unselfishly, is the great question regarding 
each life. What was the quality and intent- 
ness of his living? 

In practicing this principle of ''Do it now,'' 
which was Dr. Babcock's motto, the rule of 
''Living now the only living,'' there are two 
things that will help. One is, of two duties 
always do the harder one first. Do not sub- 
stitute an easier thing for a hard one. And 
the other is, check all unreal daydreams. 
Don't live in the past. Don't live in the 
future. Thinking backward and forward is 
necessary, but now is the living time, and 



76 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



we have memory and imagination that by 
them we may learn the lessons of the past 
and draw upon the inspiration of the future 
for the needs of present living. 

This was the method of Jesus. His life 
seems at times almost to have had no plan. 
He stopped to spend hours with any inquir- 
ing heart. He w^as impatient at no inter- 
ruption. He seized each moment's oppor- 
tunity for living purposes. He put out his 
life incessantly. He actually lived. And 
God unrolled the wonderful drama of his 
life. He did, moment by moment, his 
Father's will. ''While it is day," was his 
motto. Therefore he was at rest. ''The 
Father . . . hath not left me alone; for 
I do always the things that are pleasing to 
him." This should be our law and our life. 

Are you in earnest? 

Seize this very minute. 
What you can do 

Or think you can, begin it. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 77 



THE HABIT OF HIGH-MINDEDNESS 

EACH mind has an altitude of its own. 
Some move on low levels. The 
thoughts which come to them are low 
thoughts, sometimes evil, sometimes vain, 
sometimes merely trifling. Such minds seek 
what they like. Serious conversation and 
books are unattractive to them. They go 
where they can find w^hat is not to their dis- 
like, where stories are told and language 
spoken which involve no tax upon thought 
and which feed the tastes of a low-leveled 
life. As between the library and the grill 
room, the solid book and the empty story, 
the talk of men about real questions and life 
and the chaff and gossip of the scandal- 
spreader and fool- jester, they choose the 
lower down. There are many other levels 
below and above this. The highest is the 
level of the men who try to bring all their 
thoughts and tastes into conformity with the 
best, who by always choosing the upper and 
better have sought to acquire the habit of 
a high mind, to which evil thoughts do not 
naturally come and by which they are re- 
jected when they do come. Such men hope 



78 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



some day to come to the height of character 
set forth in Daniel's ''Epistle to the Countess 
of Cumberland" : 

He that of such a height has built his mind. 
And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, 
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame 
Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind 
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong 
His settled peace, or to disturb the same : 
What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may 
The boundless wastes and wealds of man survey ! 

And with how free an eye doth he look down 

Upon these lower regions of turmoil ! 

Where all the streams of passion mainly beat 

On flesh and blood ; where honor, power, renown, 

Are only gay afflictions, golden toil ; 

Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet, 

As frailty doth ; and only great doth seem , 

To little minds, who do it so esteem. 

How may we hope to attain to such high- 
mindedness that our thoughts will be always 
elevated and worthy, firm and consecutive, 
that our minds may be busy in good things 
and ready always for hard tasks ? 

Substantial reading will help us toward 
high-mindedness. It will give us a body of 
good thoughts. The mind will inevitably 
be employed upon something. If it is not 
employed upon what is good and high, it 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS '79 



will resort to what is evil and low. The 
radical weakness of human nature appears in 
the tendency of our minds and hearts to 
drop. There is a law of moral gravity as 
well as a law of physical gravity. Unless 
the mind is borne up, given good nourish- 
ment from without, it will drop into empty 
imaginings, or evil will slip in to fill the 
place which belongs to good. Occasionally 

U ''a full man/' such as Lord Bacon had in 
^ 1 mind, may be made by meditation, but as 

• r a rule he is made only, as Bacon said, by 
reading. To be high-minded we shall have 

; ^- to read substantial books. It is all right to 
read books of different kinds. The mind 
needs them. Dr. Thomas Arnold was very 

If positive about this. ''Keep your view of 
men and things attentive," he urged, ''and 
depend upon it that a mixed knowledge is 
not a superficial one. As far as it goes the 
views that it gives are true, but he who reads 
deeply in one class of writers only, gets views 
which are almost sure to be perverted, and 
which are not only narrow but false. Ad- 
just your proposed amount of reading to 
your time and inclination — this is perfectly 
free to every man ; but whether that amount 
be large or small, let it be varied in its kind 



80 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



and widely varied. If I have a confident 
opinion on any one point connected with the 
improvement of the human mind it is on 
this." When people read at all nowadays, 
however, this is not usually the warning they 
need. Their difficulty is their diffuse read- 
ing. What we need is more concentration 
on a few great books which we shall master 
and store in the mind. This will elevate its 
level. 

A wise use of conversation uplifts the 
mind. Perhaps sometimes we feel that we 
have nothing to give. Often the atmosphere 
of a conversation seems to congeal our 
minds. We feel a self-consciousness and un- 
naturalness which strikes us dumb. At such 
times we can at least draw out others. To 
appreciate their point of view, to draw out 
what cargo their minds carry, will quicken 
and exalt our own minds. Even where other 
people have no reasoned opinion to share 
with us they have had their histories, their 
experiences of life. They came from a definite 
childhood environment. All that we can 
draw out of them will enrich them in the 
giving and will help to ennoble the tone 
of our own minds if we view^ it with 
sympathy. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 81 



Each day has its opportunities for the en- 
richment of memory. "I know over a hun- 
dred poems and Psalms now," said an old 
man of humble circumstances but of a high 
mind. ^^I memorize them on the cars and 
whenever I can, and they make me very 
rich." A low mind cannot long remain low 
when filled with the great words which can- 
not be kept down, which soar aloft toward 
God. Each of these words displaces some 
other. The mind has elastic capacities, but 
its working sections are limited and they 
can be preempted or reclaimed by what is 
great and good. 

The high-minded man will use rightly and 
yet with strong control the floods of news- 
paper and magazine literature of the day. 
Chinese Gordon at one time stopped his 
newspapers altogether, and many people 
would be better off without them. They fill 
the mind with low and trivial interests and 
they degrade its tone. The highest type of 
mind cannot be produced from a diet of 
periodical literature. It can use the papers 
that pass in the night, but its light will be 
thrown on them, not drawn from them. 

Loving true judgments and sound knowl- 
edge for their own sake and not for the sake 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



of the commercial uses to which they can 
be put, exalts the mind. The mind that 
dwells with the truth and that ever travels 
with it will always have truth to give, but 
the gift will be the richer because free and 
not calculated, because it flows from a foun- 
tain stored up for its own sake. The love 
of truth gives the mind its fullest elevation 
and freedom. 

The mind is helped to a higher level by 
an attitude of appreciation and good will. 
If we are ever looking for what we dislike 
and disapprove we shall soon feel the down- 
pull of such an attitude upon the tone of the 
mind. That which we despise the mind 
should reject, but its lookout should always 
be for the things to which it can assent. In 
every conversation it will give most and 
gain most by picking out what it can ap- 
prove. If we watch ourselves we shall soon 
discover how practical and searching this 
principle is. The mind soon takes a hint, 
and when it learns that it is to see what is 
fair and to be blind to all else, it will re- 
spond to the appeal of higher things which 
this law addresses to it and will uplift itself. 

We must check also in the interest of the 
highest-mindedness all useless and evil 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



83 



vagaries of the imagination. The im- 
agination is a great wanderer. It loves to 
stray everywhere. There is no nook or 
cranny of the universe where it does not go, 
and many of its journeys are wasteful or 
worse. It goes down into low^ places and 
drags the mind with it. The high mind must 
lay a law upon the imagination and keep it 
on the heights. 

The highest things in the world are prin- 
ciples. Whoever associates with principles 
is in the loftiest company. The mind which 
wants to be higher should be directed toward 
principles. Each new principle which it 
finds and fixes is a new anchorage to the 
highest. When we have defined to ourselves 
dut)^ and truth and purity and unselfishness, 
we have bound our minds to the noblest we 
can know. They will be high minds as long 
as they do not forget. 

And no principles will more elevate the 
mind than the principle of prayer and the 
principle of Christ. Prayer checks all down- 
ward movement of the mind and spreads out 
over its every part the upward pulling of the 
Spirit of God. And Christ is the great prin- 
ciple of exaltation. He is more than that ; 
he is the Person who lifts. 'T, if I be lifted 



84 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



Up from the earth/' he said, "will draw all 
men unto myself/' And to be a Christian 
is to have the lower levels shut to us while 
the mind seeks the. things that are above, 
where Christ is. He has now been lifted 
up and the mind of the Christian must be 
with him, on the high levels of God. 



^ 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS S5 



THE HABIT OF HIGH-MINDED 
LOWLINESS 

HIGH-MINDEDNESS never shows it- 
self more unmistakably than in the 
humility of true unselfishness. The 
noblest illustration of this is found in the 
incident of the Saviour's washing the dis- 
ciples' feet on the evening of the night of his 
betrayal. '*Jesus, knowing that the Father 
had given all things into his hands/' says 
John, ''and that he came forth from God, and 
goeth unto God, riseth from supper, and 
layeth aside his garments ; and he took a 
tow^el, and girded himself. Then he poureth 
water into a basin, and began to wash the 
disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the 
towel wherewith he was girded." As a 
simple statement of fact this is beautiful and 
wonderful, but it is more than a statement 
of fact. It is a spiritual interpretation. 
Jesus rose and stooped. That is the fact. 
But he rose and stooped ''knowing that he 
came forth from God, and goeth unto God." 
That is the deep spiritual interpretation. 

We see here first of all the relation of 
belief to conduct, of thought to action. His 



86 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



deed sprang from his mindedness. His deed 
was lowly because his mindedness was high. 
What we hold theoretically is bound to de- 
termine what we do practically. It is so in 
the sciences and arts. The results flow from 
theory, and the theory determines the results. 
At a Yale alumni dinner some years ago, 
Mr. Julian Kennedy, a famous oarsman in 
his day and now one of the leading blast- 
furnace engineers, took issue with the 
modern demand for practical technical train- 
ing as against the old-fashioned theoretical 
type. He defended the Sheffield Scientific 
School for preserving old-time traditions in- 
stead of making its courses manual, work- 
shop courses. 'Tt is the man who knows 
the theory who does the thing,'' said he. 'Tt 
is the true theory that counts. The man who 
designed the guns used on the American 
ships in the Spanish War never had any ex- 
perience with a hammer and bench, and he 
did not see the guns cast. It was all purely 
theoretical. But when the guns went off 
the results were not theoretical." And so 
in all great modern buildings. The en- 
gineers sit in their offices and figure and draw 
on paper. In mihs which they do not visit, 
the girders are made. On ground which 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 87 



they have never seen the material is as- 
sembled and the bridge or the sky-scraper is 
reared, each piece fitting each other piece, 
and the whole great structure falling prac- 
tically together from mere theoretical draw- 
ings. The result flows from the mindedness 
of the engineer. And what is true in these 
arts is true also in the art of life. There 
as truly as in the physical sciences results de- 
pend upon our theories, what we do upon 
what we think. Professor James begins his 
lectures on ''Pragmatism" with a quotation 
from Mr. Chesterton's ''Heretics," in which 
he sets forth his conviction : "There are 
some people,'' says Mr. Chesterton, "and I 
am one of them, who think that the most 
practical and important thing about a man 
is still his view of the universe. We think 
that for a landlady considering a lodger it 
is important to know his income but still 
more important to know his philosophy. . . . 
We think the question is not whether the 
theory of the cosmos affects matters, but 
whether in the long run anything else affects 
them." And Professor James adds: "I 
think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I 
know that you ladies and gentlemen have a 
philosophy, each and all of you, and that 



88 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



the most interesting and important thing 
about you is the way in which it determines 
the perspective in your several worlds." 

What kind of mind we have will determine 
what kind of deeds we do, and it is primarily 
upon these questions on which Jesus had a 
certain mind that all depends. He knew his 
origin and his destiny. In a note in one 
of his books, Ruskin says there are three 
great questions which confront every soul : 
* Where did I come from? What can I 
know? Where am I going?" What we do 
depends on what our mind is with regard to 
these. We shall serve men in the spirit of 
God if we have a mind high enough to realize 
its heavenly origin and heavenly destiny. 

We see also in this incident in Jesus' life 
power conscious of itself but used in serv- 
ice. That is the end of power. The supreme 
virtue of machinery is docility. The history 
of civilization is only the story of the taming 
of force, the bending of the power of nature 
to obedience. Just so Jesus regarded living 
power. It was a thing to be used. ''There- 
fore doth the Father love me, because I lay 
down my life,'' he said. 'T have power to 
lay it down, and I have power to take it 
again." It was this possession of limitless 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 89 



power all subjugated to unselfishness which 
made Jesus so calm and steadfast. He had 
the habit of lofty-minded self-forgetfulness. 
Such self-forgetfulness and unselfishness 
are a sign of confidence in one's ow^n posi- 
tion, an evidence of easy noble-mindedness. 
It is the noble who dare be lowly. Jesus with 
his full knowledge of his origin and destiny 
in God would stoop to any lowliness. He 
was high-minded enough to dare. It is told 
by one of the childhood friends of the late 
Walter Lowrie, who was drowned at New- 
port in 1 901, just at the threshold of his 
career, that ''one summer several young peo- 
ple, some guests of the family, and the 
Lowrie boys were waiting outside the Tyrone 
station for a train. A wretched-looking wo- 
man w^ith a little baby in her arms, carrying 
a traveling bag, came past, with another lit- 
tle child hardly able to walk clinging to her 
skirts and following as best it could. One 
of the boys, half in earnest, probably, yet 
thinking it was like Walter, said, 'There's 
your chance,' and without hesitation Walter 
spoke to the woman, picked up the child and 
carried it over to the branch train and onto a 
car. It was always rather crowded round 
the station in the afternoon, and Walter came 



90 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



back looking a little foolish, not because he 
minded being seen by so many, but rather, 
T think, because we could not help showing 
that wt thought it fine of him, and he had 
a horror of showing off." He was sure 
enough of his social position to dare to stoop. 
A high mind bred a lowly love. 

And is there not a self-revelation in 
haughtiness and pride? Where there is no 
lowly love we know there is no true high- 
mindedness. The people who are priggish 
and snobbish, who act discourteously, betray 
an origin and a destiny very different from 
the Saviour's, who rose and stooped. 

And deeds not only reveal our minds, 
haughty deeds low minds and lowly deeds 
lofty minds, but deeds also help to make 
minds. Humble and loving acts will help to 
make us high-minded. 

Wouldst thou the holy hill ascend 

And see the Father's face, 
To all his children humbh^ bend 

And seek the lowest place. 
Thus humbly doing on the earth 

What things the lofty scorn 
Thou shalt assert the noble birth 

Of all the lowly born. 

On the other hand, unlowly conduct is a 
source of deterioration of mind and charac- 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 91 



ter. That was why the best sentiment of 
the South disapproved of slavery. It might 
or might not be bad for the slave. It was 
unmistakably bad for the slaveholder. Xo 
man was fit to own another man. The sense 
of ownership of a man could not be good 
for the man who owned him. And so haz- 
ing, often good for the hazed, is invariably 
bad for the hazer. All use of power that 
is not humble and unselfish is bad for high- 
mindedness. The possession of • it is pre- 
sumption not for its willful exercise, but for 
its restraint. Wt have it only as a trust. 

Naught that I have my own I call, 

I hold it for the Giver. 
My heart, my life, my strength, my all. 

Are his and his forever. 

He who feels this and acts upon it is the 
truly high-minded man. 



92 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



THE HABIT OF NOT DAWDLING 

THE habit of not dawdling is one of the 
most needed and most useful Chris- 
tian habits. A dawdler can't really 
make a good Christian. If he does, he in- 
variably ceases to be a dawdler. 

Plenty of boys and girls who are now 
dawdlers have in them the making of good 
Christians, and one of the first signs of their 
real purpose to be Christians will be the lay- 
ing aside of all dawdling. Some boys take 
twice as long to run an errand as it ought 
to take and waste a great deal of time mak- 
ing up their minds to run it. Some girls 
are so slow in dressing that their mothers 
have to do a great many things which their 
daughters could have done for them if they 
had only been prompt and quick. A great 
deal of time and patience is wasted by 
dawdlers. 

And as a rule the dawdlers are the very 
people who complain most when other peo- 
ple dawdle and inconvenience them. If the 
postman loiters along the way and delivers 
the mail late, if the train is slow and does 
not arrive on time, if the coachman who was 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 93 



to meet the train lounges about his work and 
is not there, no one is more impatient than 
the very people who always dawdle them- 
selves and who are now vexed at nothing 
but the very principle on which they them- 
selves act, the principle of dallying with one's 
work instead of doing it. 

There is a good word for all dawdlers 
in the Second Book of Samuel. It was after 
the long war between the house of Saul and 
the house of David. At last Abner re- 
volted from the house of Saul and sent word 
to the elders of Israel, saying, 'Tn times past 
ye sought for David to be king over you : 
now then do it." That was- the manly way 
to talk. ''Now then do it." Duties are 
not to be talked about, they are to be done. 
In our work and our warfare with evil and 
in our home duties and our achievement of 
character, the word for us is Abner's word, 
''Do it." 

It is foolish to dawdle because of fear 
that we cannot do. The only way that 
we can find out whether we can or not is 
to try at once and to try hard. And all that 
we ought we can. There is no such thing 
as impossibility in the line of our divinely 
assigned work. General Armstrong used to 



94 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



scorn the idea of impossibility. At an In- 
dian Rights conference at Lake Mohonk he 
once leaped up, when some one had pro- 
nounced a certain righteous course of action 
as impossible, with the words : ''Impossible ! 
What are Christians in the world for but 
to achieve the impossible by the help of 
God?" As he went about in behalf of 
Hampton Institute he was constantly com- 
pelled to do what could not be done. ''Once/' 
he said, "there was a woodchuck and a dog 
got after him. Now woodchucks can't climb 
trees, but this one had to, so up he went.'' 
And another time, when he simply had to 
get money for the school, he told of an old 
negro who was seen digging in a tree for 
a 'possum. Some one told him there was 
no 'possum there. "Ain't no 'possum in dat 
hole?" said the old man. "Dey's just got 
to be, 'cause dey's nuffin' in de house for 
supper." 

Men always can. "I can do all things in 
him that strengtheneth me," declared Paul. 
There were, of course, things which he did 
not do. There are things which we cannot 
do. But the only way to find out is to try, 
and if we try we shall find that we can do 
everything that we ought to do. There is 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 95 



no excuse for dawdling because we can't 
perform. 

The best cure is to begin at once. In the 
matter of character-building, w^here daw- 
dling is most deadly and most easy, we can 
begin now by cutting off some indulgence, 
or by taking on some new practice, such as 
prayer at a fixed hour or a new attitude in 
prayer which will break up dawdling habits. 
Or we can deal with our speech, and by 
making it clear and right and instant, help 
to confirm the habit of straightforwardness. 

But the difficulty with most dawdlers is 
not the difficulty of beginning, but the diffi- 
culty of keeping at it. They are like the son 
in the parable who said promptly, 'T go, 
sir," and went not. They are ready to make 
a start, but they soon stop to rest or to think 
of something else or to look out of the win- 
dow or to wish that the task were done. 
They are hke the Bandar-log, the Monkey 
People who are always dreaming and wish- 
ing that things could be done just by wish- 
ing that they were done, who never stick at 
anything long enough to complete it, but 
always are carried off by some new scheme. 

There is a character in the '^Jungle Book" 
who was no dawdler. That was Rikki-tikki- 



96 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



tavi. When he saw something to be done 
he did it, and when he took hold he did not 
let go. Woe to Rikki-tikki if in his fight 
with Nag he had released his hold on the 
big cobra's head, and woe to the family in 
the bungalow if he had dawdled in taking 
hold. 

In our struggle for character we must not 
be frightened into letting go. We shall 
certainly be lifted up higher before we get 
through than we had ever dared to hope to 
go, but we are not to fear. The Saviour 
of whom we have taken hold has taken hold 
of us with his divine grasp and he means to 
raise us far above all that is low in life and 
at last to lift us sheer into his home above. 
We ought not to be fearful. 

Jesus when he was here was looking for 
men who would not dawdle. His own life 
was full of eager, unhesitating action, and 
he called men to come to him in the same 
spirit, and straightway they rose up and left 
all and followed him. That was the kind of 
disciple he desired. And he taught these 
men how to act as the workmen of God, 
prompt, eager, ready for opportunity, quick 
to do every duty. 

In life and work we are not to be as those 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 97 



who are asleep, who begin, perhaps wake- 
fully, but soon dawdle off again. We are 
to watch and work as the children of the 
day. Our Captain's appeal to us is the old 
hymn : 

Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve, 

And press with vigor on ; 
A heavenly race demands thy zeal, 

And an immortal crown. 

A cloud of witnesses around 

Hold thee in full survey: 
Forget the steps already trod, 

And onward urge thy way. 

'Tis God's all-animating voice 

That calls thee from on high ; 
Tis his own hand presents the prize 

To thine aspiring eye : 

That prize with peerless glories bright, 

Which shall new luster boast. 
When victors' wreaths and monarchs' gems 

Shall blend in common dust. 

Blest Saviour, introduced by thee, 

Have I my race begun ; 
And, crowned. with glory, at thy feet 

I'll lay my honors down. 



98 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



THE HABIT OF DECISION 

THE word decision occurs in only one 
place in the Bible. That is in the third 
chapter of Joel. ''Multitudes, multi- 
tudes in the valley of decision ! for the day 
of Jehovah is near in the valley of decision." 
This was the valley where issues were set- 
tled and judgment was to be passed. To 
that momentous time Jehovah was bringing 
the nations. In that valley is where all men 
ever are. 

And so, though the word occurs only here, 
in the prophecy of Joel, the idea of the sig- 
nificance of our choices, and the importance 
and supremacy of the act and character of 
decision, is everywhere in the Bible. God 
is shown to us as the great chooser, the One 
who deals with men and nations with posi- 
tive and firm decision. He is spoken of thus 
twenty-eight times in Deuteronomy alone. 
And the true man is set forth as the chooser. 
'T have chosen the way of faithfulness," he 
says. ''Thine ordinances have I set before 
me. I cleave unto thy testimonies : . . . Let 
thy hand be ready to help me; for I have 
chosen thy precepts." This was the glory 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



of Daniel and his friends. When they joined 
the young men in the king's court, they de- 
cided that they would not defile themselves, 
and when, later, they were put to the test 
of fidelity to their God, they met the test 
with unflinching decision. To the threat of 
the fiery furnace they solemnly replied : ''Our 
God whom we serve is able to deliver us from 
the burning fiery furnace; and he will de- 
liver us out of thy hand, O king. But if 
not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we 
will not serve thy gods, nor worship the 
golden image which thou hast set up.'' De- 
cision was the redeeming quality in the un- 
just steward. And it was the splendid thing 
in Paul. He was always straightforward, 
clear-cut, decisive. It was not his habit to 
temporize and dawdle. It was his habit at 
once to seek the will of God and to do it. 
The habit of decision is still the great and 
commanding virtue. The undecided man, 
the wabbler, is to us the most pathetic and 
helpless of men. In ''David Harum" there 
was a man who was always distressed when 
he had to make up his mind. He could not 
decide what shoes to put on in the morning, 
and he would get a black shoe on one foot 
and a tan shoe on the other foot, and then 



100 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



sit in misery, unable to decide which one to 
change. The New Testament is strong in 
its condemnation of the irresolute man. ''Be 
no longer children/' it says, ''tossed to and 
fro and carried about with every wind of doc- 
trine, by the sleight of men, in craftiness, 
after the wiles of error.'' "He that doubt- 
eth," adds James, "is like the surge of the 
sea driven by the wind and tossed. For let 
not that man think that he shall receive any- 
thing of the Lord; a doubleminded man, 
unstable in all his ways." How different and 
how much nobler is the man who can act, |f 

who is ever ready for instant and unhesi- 
tating action. "I hate this dreadful titter- 
fritteration of time; I can't stand it any 
longer," said Samuel C. Armstrong during 
the war. He was used to decision, to doing 
things. 

Few books have exerted more influence 
than John Fosters essay on "Decision of 
Character.'' That is our great need — such 
a habit of decision that we shall not waste 
time and strength in thinking about future 
decisions, or in devising reasons for not mak- 
ing present decisions, but shall do at once, 
without delay, what we see to be duty. 
When our fathers or employers say, "My 




A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



101 



/I 



boy, will you please do this," we will say, 
whatever we are doing at the time, not ''Ex- 
cuse me for a moment, please," not ''I cannot 
just now," but ''Yes, sir," and do it with- 
out loitering. And we need the habit of 
decision not only as to acts, but also as to 
character, so that we shall be firm and posi- 
tive and straight-acting. Some people are 
this way. They know how to make up their 
minds and to do directly what they have 
minded to do. And others are wabblers and 
hesitators. 

Perhaps we say : "Yes, we are among 
the weak. How can we acquire the habit 
of decision?" 

A house needs a foundation. So does 
a character. Or rather the house is the 
foundation plus the structure built upon it. 
The character runs down, too, to include 
the foundation. If we want characters of 
decision we should lay the physical basis 
for them in clean, active, swift-answering 
bodies. We can give ourselves a good, 
wholesome discipline to this end by taking 
our bodies in hand. With many great men 
early poverty and necessity did this service 
for them, and frugality and hard work gave 
them tough, well-knit, well-purged bodies. 



102 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



But deliberate choice can take the place of 
necessity. Paul tells us he took his body in 
hand and disciplined it. ''I buffet my body/' 
he says, ''and bring it into bondage/' A 
governed will is not likely to live in an un- 
governed body. An alert, determined, 
quick-working will is more at home in a body 
held in subjection and taught obedience. 

\Yt can help ourselves to become resolute 
and decided by doing conclusive thinking on 
our problems. We need to make up our 
minds on fundamental things and to keep 
them made up. There are many questions 
about which we do not need to bother our- 
selves, and which should not bother us. 
These we can postpone. But there are others 
which lie at the very root of things. The 
questions of the supremacy of truth, of our 
duty to God and man, of the divinity of 
Christ, are central questions. We should 
think of them until we are clear about them, 
and we should build solidly upon our con- 
victions of truth and act fearlessly in accord 
with them. If we have no convictions 
we shall have little character. Decision in 
conviction will produce decision in char- 
acter. 

If we fix our attention rigidly on virtue, 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 103 



on truth, on things that are good, we shall 
find that such thinking breeds decisiveness 
of action and character. Our wills are given 
to us for the purpose of directing our 
thoughts. ''The point to which the will is 
applied is always an idea," says one of our 
leading psychologists. ''The only resistance 
which our will can possibly experience is the 
resistance which such an idea offers to being 
attended to at all." If, accordingly, we will 
think of good things and of doing good 
things, and will, as we can, refuse to 
let our attention turn to bad things or to 
not doing good things, the rest will take 
care of itself, or, rather, God who is 
working in us will take care of it. Paul 
knew this when, in the counsel he gave the 
Philippians, he bade them simply to take care 
of their thoughts. "Whatsoever things," he 
said, "are true, whatsoever things are honor- 
able, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever 
things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, 
whatsoever things are of good report; if 
there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, 
think on these things." If they thought thus 
first, then they would do what he bade, and 
the God of peace and strength would be 
with them — the God of decision. 



104 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



Also we can help ourselves by practice. 
We can set ourselves by practice to make 
decision a habit of our life. Professor James 
has told us how to acquire the good habits 
we desire. These are some of his sugges- 
tions : (i) Make automatic and habitual, as 
early as possible, as many helpful actions as 
we can. Get into the way of settling things 
decisively. (2) We must launch ourselves 
with as strong and decided an initiative as 
possible. The new Christian must openly 
and bravely confess Christ. This will make 
him surer in his discipleship, and it will make 
him a firmer and more dauntless character. 
(3) Never suffer an exception to occur until 
the new habit is securely rooted in your 
life. Following this rule with any good habit 
we wish to acquire will breed decision. (4) 
Seize the first possible opportunity to act on 
every resolution you make and every prompt- 
ing you may experience in the direction of 
the habits you aspire to gain. (5) Keep the 
faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratu- 
itous exercise every day. '"The man who 
has daily inured himself to habits of con- 
secrated attention, energetic volition and self- 
denial in unnecessary things, will stand like 
a tower when everything rocks around him 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 105 



and when his softer fellow-mortals are win- 
nowed like chaff in the blast." 

Unselfishness is a great help to decisive- 
ness of character. It is easier to think 
quickly for others than it is for ourselves, and 
if we will set out to do things for other peo- 
ple we will find that we can be decided for 
them where we Vv^ere irresolute for ourselves. 
And unselfishness is itself an essential part 
of decision. Decision of character involves 
readiness to dO' for the right and to die for 
^, ^ the right. It is that that marks us as men 

\ I and that shows that we have achieved the 

manly character. General Armstrong's negro 
troops sang this in ''The Enlisted Soldier" : 

We want no cowards in our band 

That will their colors fly, 
We call for valiant-hearted men 

Who're not afraid to die. 
They look like men. They look like men. 

They look like men of war. 
All armed and dressed in uniform 

They look like men of war. 

Are we such men or do we only look like 
them ? 

And lastly, the unflinching Christ, who 
never hesitated, but met all, can take us and 
make us his. His living Spirit, which 



106 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



wrought in Simon Peter, who denied him at 
the taunt of a girl, but a few days later faced 
the multitude in his name, and died at last 
in his service, can work also in us the same 
mighty change from weakness to decision. 
Shall he not be given freedom to do it? 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS. 107 



THE HABIT OF FINDING THE 
WILL OF GOD 

THE most important thing in life to look 
for is the will of God. Nothing can 
be of more significance to each of 
us than his own right life work, which that 
will assigns. 'Tor what doth it profit a 
man," asked Jesus, ''to gain the whole world, 
and forfeit his life?" Which we may in- 
terpret to mean, in the language of our own 
condition, what shall it profit a man to gain 
the whole world but to miss his life work? 
God has such a work for each one of us. It 
is made up of all the works he has for us 
to do day by day. We need, above all things, 
the habit of always finding this work. 

The strength of life consists in the power 
of the grip of God's purpose upon us. Has 
it control of us? The hold of a man upon 
truth, it has been remarked, is of less con- 
sequence than the hold of the truth upon the 
man. How fast does it hold him? How 
completely does it dominate him ? These are 
the questions which arise also regarding our 
lives and the will of God. Does it have a grip 
upon us? How masterfully does it hold us? 



108 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



It is all right for us to talk of our purpose 
for God, but the great reality is God's pur- 
pose for us. When we have been absorbed 
in that, then at last we know what strength 
and rest are. We lean then not upon the 
firmness of our resolves, but upon the mighty 
grasp of God and his will upon our lives. 

We have no right to fall into the habit of 
drifting with regard to the will of God. 
Many people move along, accepting all that 
comes without scrutiny, assuming that the f . 

path of least effort, least resolution, least re- 1 1' 

sistance, is the will of God. Sometimes it 
is, and sometimes, oftener, it is not. We are 
bound to think, to open life to all the di- 
vine possibilities, to consider anything that 
may be able to show that it is the will of 
God for us. ''The family money was in that 
business," said a young man studying for 
the ministry, of a great business firm, "and 
I might have gone in there too. It would 
have meant a good deal more in the way of 
return to the family, but I didn't see that 
that was w^here I wanted to put my life." 
So he chose what God chose for him, entirely 
apart from the natural and obvious thing for 
him. If we are going to find the will of God 
we must be willing to look for it where it 



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A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 109 



is, which will often be where we don't ex- 
pect to find it. 

Many men have been diverted from what 
they at first wanted and thought was God's 
will, but found out in time was not. Every 
man who is following a selfish or evil course 
will find himself wrenched away from that 
the moment he seeks the w411 of God. But 
even among good men the will of God is 
constantly a surprise. David Livingstone 
desired ardently to go to China. He had 
been interested in China through Gutzlaff. 
But God's will took him to Africa. Robert 
Morrison wanted to go to Africa. God's 
will took him to China. Griffith John wanted 
to go to Madagascar. But God's will led him 
to central China. Whoever would habitu- 
ally follow the will of God must be pre- 
pared for surprises — all of them ultimately 
far better than our original designs. 

And now, assuming that we are willing 
to follow the will of God, how may we get 
into the habit of knowing what it is ? 

( I ) First, then, however great our prob- 
lems ahead may be, there is always some 
small duty near. The first thing is to do 
that, to get into the habit of always doing 
that. That will lead on to the next thing. 



110 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



Life is a unity. It may look like a chaos 
and tangle, but it is one, not a heap of de- 
tached items. It is rather like a long twine. 
What we need to do is to take hold where 
we can and work straight along. So in find- 
ing duty we need to accept the present task. 
To shirk our present assignment bHnds us 
for seeing future assignment. The accept- 
ance of present duty teaches us the habit of 
doing all duty, of ever knowing God's will. 

(2) Think carefully of the reasons for and 
against the various possible courses of action, 
and balance them as well as you can. In 
his reminiscences, John D. Rockefeller tells 
how, in the early years of the Standard 
Oil Company, he and his associates were 
always ready to consider and to discuss any 
proposal whatever. They were looking for 
the best methods, and never took it for 
granted that there were no better ones than 
those they were following. If men act in 
this way in business, much more in the su- 
preme thing of all ought we to be open- 
minded and thoughtful. 

(3) Seek unselfish, disinterested and high- 
minded counsel. ]\Iany people ask advice of 
those who will not counsel them impartially, 
but whose judgment is biased by desire. 



A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 111 



And even when they ask disinterested coun- 
sel, it is not always high-minded. People 
w^ho do not themselves live in the will of 
God, and who have no habit of regarding it, 
are poor people to consult. 

(4) Above all others whom we consult, 
we should advise with God through prayer. 
His counsel is worth more than that of 
anyone else, and he is ready to give it. Be- 
cause of our own ignorance, our helpless- 
ness and impatience, because of the spiritual 
hindrances without and within with which 
only prayer can cope, because God knows 
what we cannot know and makes his knowl- 
edge available for our guidance, we ought 
to seek the habit of discernment of duty 
through prayer. 

(5) We should put off all unnecessary de- 
cisions as to details. Such details usually 
take care of themselves in any case. But we 
should settle, as soon as possible, the great 
questions of principle. God's custom is to 
show not the end of the way, but the way. 
What will come later on in the way we 
must not ask. We must settle now the di- 
rection of the way. The earlier we decide 
the better, for the sake of our character, for 
the sake of our preparation for the future, 




112 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



for the sake of our influence now. We have 
no such assurance of the future as will war- 
rant us in putting off the acceptance of God's 
true will for our lives. 

(6) Let us keep ever before us the Scrip- 
ture principles of duty-knowing and duty- 
doing : ''Seek ye first his kingdom, and his 
righteousness"; ''Lay not up for yourselves 
treasures upon the earth, where moth and 
rust consume, and where thieves break 
through and steal'' ; "We look not at the 
things which are seen, but at the things jT 
which are not seen : for the things which are 
seen are temporal; but the things which are 
not seen are eternal" ; "Seek the tWngs that 
are above, where Christ is." In all things let 
Jesus Christ "have the preeminence." The 
higher our hearts are lifted above the ma- 
terial and transient, the more fully and joy- 
fully and naturally will they move among 
men, ruling the present world and not being 
ruled by it. 

(7) Let us habitually ask what is morally 
right and face this question unflinchingly 
and under the scrutiny of Christ. What so- 
ciety approves is of no great consequence. 
The important question is, "What is in ac- 
cord with the character of God?" Right- 



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A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 113 



eousness is not the consensus of opinion. It 
is what Christ is. We shall always recognize 
God's will if we always see God in Christ 
and test all things in that presence. 

(8) We must not be timid about taking 
chances. Faith is a venture. It is a rea- 
sonable venture — far more reasonable than 
unwillingness to take the venture — but still 
it is a venture. If we never leap into the 
dark we shall never find eternal life or eternal 
service here, or the Eternal City hereafter. 
The will of God is not a visible and ma- 
terial object. It is a way of the soul. Only 
the soul's eyes can discern it. The habit 
of seeing it is the habit of seeing with the 
inward vision. 

(9) We can fortify the habit of doing 
God's will by ever choosing the personal 
duties. Jesus always did this. He was al- 
ways accessible to souls. No enterprise was 
more important to him than the service of 
souls, of living persons. Personal duty 
should always be given the preference by us. 
As over against any general, indefinite, in- 
stitutional calls, there are always the calls 
of particular men, women and children. 
These are the important things. If we get 
into the habit of finding people who need 



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114 A CHRISTIAN'S HABITS 



help and of helping them, we shall be fol- 
lowing the religion of God, as James de- 
fines it. 

(id) There are two selves in each of us 
— a superior and an inferior. We are never 
in any doubt as to which is which. We may 
be in doubt as to some outer problem, but 
we know the better nature in us. What does 
it require? The better within us can never 
be satisfied save by the will of God. 

( II ) Lastly, almost everything will depend 
on how commanding the conception of duty 
is with us. If our habit is to do duty, and in 
our minds and hearts we exalt duty as the 
loftiest thing in life, we shall be able to find 
what each particular duty is much more easily 
than if the whole notion of duty is slovenly 
and careless. If we regard the will of God 
as the one commanding thing, and habitually 
order our lives by the desire to do it, we 
shall have no trouble in acquiring the habit 
of recognizing always what it is. 

There could be no greater or finer habit 
than this. We have a fine old hymn which 
exalts it in the one noble line : 

To do Thy will the habit of my heart. 

Is it the habit of our hearts? 



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SEP 28 1945 



N. 



